Recurred - Subscription Manager VS useEffect.dev

Recurred - Subscription Manager's answer

Ask someone what they're subscribed to and you'll hear Netflix, Spotify, maybe a gym they stopped visiting in February. That's the category almost every app in this space is built around, and it's a thin slice of what actually leaves your account.

I track around 40 subscriptions in 5 currencies, and most of mine aren't entertainment: mobile plan, home internet, domain renewals, cloud storage, dev tools, a couple of AI subscriptions, insurance billed once a year. Recurred is built for that list.

Which is why multi-currency isn't bolted on. You track each subscription in the currency you're billed in and get one total in yours.

The year matters more than the month here. A $12 monthly thing is $144 a year, and nobody cancels a $12 thing. A dozen of them is a flight home. Monthly framing makes every line look harmless.

And it's free with everything unlocked. That was a constraint I set on day one, not a launch promotion. There won't be a paid tier.

Recurred - Subscription Manager's answer

Price is the obvious one. Before I wrote any code I installed a dozen trackers and deleted every one. Most of them wanted a monthly payment, which is a strange thing to ask of someone installing an app to get their monthly payments under control. Recurred is free with every feature unlocked.

The rest is about what's in one app instead of five. The features I wanted already existed, just scattered: a good calendar here, a decent breakdown there. I used several for a while and was never happy with any of them. Recurred has the renewal calendar with trial-conversion reminders, real multi-currency support, category and top-spender breakdowns, price history, a 3-year timeline built from what you actually paid, home screen widgets, and an Optimizer that watches how often you open each service and tells you what to cut.

Then there's what it doesn't do. It never asks for a bank login, so no aggregator holds read access to your accounts. There's no account to create and no analytics SDK. The plain-English entry runs on device, so what you type about your finances stays on your phone.

It's SwiftUI top to bottom on iPhone and iPad. Dark mode first, Dynamic Type and VoiceOver on every screen, no web views.

Recurred - Subscription Manager's answer

People whose subscription list runs well past streaming. The typical user has 20+ recurring payments and most of them are unglamorous: SaaS tools, cloud storage, domains, mobile and internet plans, AI subscriptions, insurance.

Two kinds of people in particular. Anyone billed in more than one currency, so expats, remote workers, freelancers with clients abroad, who are currently maintaining a spreadsheet with exchange rates in it. I had that spreadsheet. It was worse. And people who won't hand bank credentials to an aggregator just to categorize charges they can already name.

Apple only, on purpose. iPhone and iPad, plus Apple silicon Macs running it as a Designed for iPad app until the real Mac version is done. No Android version is planned. One person, one ecosystem, done properly.

Recurred - Subscription Manager's answer

I track around 40 subscriptions in 5 currencies. Before writing a line of code I installed a dozen trackers and deleted every one. Some had most of what I wanted and stopped right where it got interesting. A couple were beautiful and did almost nothing. Most had a payment screen.

I had a working proof of concept in November 2025. Subscriptions in, calendar out, currency math in the middle. On my own phone it looked finished.

Then I didn't touch it until the middle of June 2026. I was busy, but that's not the honest answer. The honest answer is I knew what came next: onboarding, empty states, iCloud sync conflicts, notification scheduling, Dynamic Type at the largest sizes, VoiceOver labels on charts, an icon, screenshots, a privacy page. None of it demos well. All of it is the app.

Once I sat back down in June it moved fast.

I'm a backend engineer, mostly Go, and I lead a team at a bank with native mobile apps. Reviewing mobile pull requests without ever having shipped a mobile app is a thin position to argue from. Wrapping a web view would have skipped the whole lesson, so it's Swift and SwiftUI all the way down.

Recurred - Subscription Manager's answer

Swift and SwiftUI, fully native on iPhone and iPad. It also runs on Apple silicon Macs as a Designed for iPad app while I work on a proper Mac version.

WidgetKit for the two home screen widgets.

CloudKit for sync, into the user's own iCloud. There's no database on my side.

Apple Foundation Models for the plain-English entry, running on device on Apple Intelligence capable hardware.

Go for the only server-side piece: a small service that keeps exchange rates fresh. It pulls from six providers with a cache in front, so one of them going down or going weird doesn't take the app's totals with it.