Hospitals charge like nobody's watching. We watch.
Deadswitch Labs is an open-source AI auditor for medical bills. Feed it a bill, it flags the line items insurers and patient advocates know are wrong — duplicate charges, upcoded ER visits, balance billing that violates the No Surprises Act, facility fees that don't belong — and drafts a dispute letter citing the specific federal or state law.
v1 is the working command-line auditor — install it from Source and audit a bill in five minutes. This is and will remain a CLI tool — your bills never leave your machine.
The auditor reads a bill (PDF, image, or text), then runs three passes:
It also includes a charity care eligibility checker — nonprofit hospitals are required by IRS Section 501(r) to write off bills for patients below specific income thresholds. Most patients never know they qualify.
$ deadswitch audit your-bill.pdf --state AZ --income 30000 --household 2 DEADSWITCH LABS — Medical Bill Auditor Fighting for you. [1/3] Parsing bill... ✓ Found 14 line items Provider: Banner University Medical Center Total billed: $24,847 Patient owes: $7,253 [2/3] Auditing for errors... ⚠ Found 3 critical issue(s): • Duplicate chest X-ray charge (CPT 71046 billed twice) Estimated overcharge: $892 Action: Demand removal of duplicate — cite CMS billing rule 42 CFR 489.20 • Level 5 ER visit (99285) inconsistent with documented complaint Estimated overcharge: $1,840 Action: Request itemized chart notes; appeal under hospital's E&M coding policy • Zero contractual adjustment posted — in-network claim Estimated overcharge: $4,521 Action: Demand insurer-contracted rate be applied; cite plan EOB ⚡ 2 warning(s): • Facility fee billed at outpatient location • No good-faith estimate provided pre-service Charity Care Eligibility: ✓ Likely qualifies for FULL charity care Income is 147% of Federal Poverty Level 💰 Total potential savings: $7,253 [3/3] Generating dispute letter... ✓ Dispute letter generated Send to: Banner University Medical Center, Patient Financial Services Disputed amount: $7,253
Sample bill is fictional. Real cases vary. The CLI is open source under AGPL-3.0
— clone the repo, set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, point it at your own bill.
Deadswitch handles PHI — medical bills with patient names, account numbers, diagnosis codes. Hosting that on a web server requires a HIPAA-grade compliance posture I’m not willing to ship without doing right.
So the trade: the CLI runs on your machine, sends only the parsed line items to the LLM (never the full PHI), and the dispute letter is generated locally. Nothing about your bill ever sits on a server I control. That removes both the legal exposure and the “what if we get hacked” risk in one move.
If you wanted a hosted version, that’s a no. The CLI is the product. For updates when something material ships (new state coverage, faster install, etc.), drop a line to [email protected]. No commitment, no card, low volume.
Not legal advice. Deadswitch Labs is software that helps you draft a dispute letter citing federal and state regulations. It does not represent you, file on your behalf, or replace a lawyer. If your case involves litigation, wage garnishment, or credit damage, talk to an attorney — many states have free legal-aid programs for medical debt (try LawHelp.org or your state bar's lawyer-referral service).