Aurabill support

The import reads pixels. It does not talk to Apple, so it can only find what is actually in the picture you hand it. Work through these in order.

1. Check what you photographed. The import expects the Subscriptions page inside the App Store app, the one Aurabill opens for you when you tap “Open My Apple Subscriptions”. A payment history page, a bank app, or a receipt email will parse to zero rows. That is deliberate: the parser refuses to guess, which is why it does not invent subscriptions you do not have.

2. Keep the whole page in frame. Do not crop, mark up, or edit the screenshot. The section headers, “Active” and “Inactive”, tell the parser what it is looking at. Cropping them out costs you rows.

3. Take the screenshot on the iPhone itself. A photo of your screen taken with another phone will not be recognized as a screenshot and usually will not read cleanly.

4. Check your App Store language. The parser’s keyword tables are English only today. If your App Store account shows the Subscriptions page in another language, the rows will not be recognized even though the text is read correctly.

5. Try again from the picker. On the “Nothing to import” screen, tap Try again and pick a different capture.

If it still finds nothing, tap Add manually. Everything in Aurabill works the same for a subscription you typed in yourself: reminders, totals, the 12-month calendar, the cancel routes, the savings counter. Import is a shortcut, never a requirement.

Nothing is saved until you tap the “Add N subscriptions” button at the bottom of the review screen. Everything above that button is editable, and rows you uncheck are simply not created.

The review screen sorts what it found into four groups. Needs attention means something is uncertain, usually that the screenshot did not state a price, so the price came from our built-in catalog and is captioned “Typical price, check yours”. Tap the row and set your real price. Active read cleanly and is checked by default. Expired or cancelled is unchecked by default; check those if you want them counted toward money saved. Already in Aurabill matched something you already track, and is skipped so you do not get duplicates.

Two specific things to look at. A name matched to the wrong service: tap the row, and if we were unsure a “Did you mean…” chip offers the match plus a button to keep the name exactly as the screenshot spelled it. A billing cycle in amber, shown as ANNUAL?: Apple’s list often states no billing period at all. When it does not, we infer the cycle and label the guess honestly, with a footer saying where the guess came from. Confirm or change it before adding. A monthly price filed as yearly is a twelvefold error, so this is the one field worth checking every time.

Scroll and screenshot again. One import accepts up to 10 screenshots. Overlap is fine and encouraged. Rows are merged by name, so a subscription that appears in two captures is created once.

Include the date line. A row is normally only emitted when the capture also shows its renewal or expiry line. That rule is why all seven adversarial images in our test corpus, an in-app payment history and six bank-app screens, produce zero rows, while the one genuine Apple subscriptions list yields all five of its rows and nothing else.

A row cut in half at the bottom edge is not thrown away. If that same screenshot also caught one of Apple’s section headers, the half-row is kept as a low-confidence candidate and filed under Needs attention, waiting for an overlapping screenshot to complete it. If it did not catch a header, the half-row is discarded. That is the other reason overlapping captures are worth taking.

Add it by hand. Faster than a third attempt. The catalog search prefills the price and category for the services it knows.

Two things to note while you are here. Aurabill never asks for photo library access and cannot browse your library; the picker runs outside the app and hands over only the images you tap. And once the import is done you can delete those screenshots from Photos. Nothing was copied. The images are read in memory and dropped.

There are 60 services in the built-in catalog today, and it grows with app updates.

The catalog only saves typing. It prefills a typical price, a category, and a monogram color, and for some services it carries a direct cancel page. It is not a list of what Aurabill supports. In the add screen, type the name and tap Add “name” as custom. The subscription then behaves exactly like a catalog one in every screen.

What a custom entry does not get: a prefilled price, an automatic category, and a direct cancel page. If Apple bills it, the route to your Apple subscriptions (App Store) still works regardless.

To get a service added, email us the name and the country you pay in. Catalog additions ship with app updates.

One thing that will not change: there are no service logos anywhere in Aurabill, only colored monograms. That is deliberate. It avoids trademark trouble, and it means the app never makes a request per service that would reveal what you subscribe to.

Reminders are local notifications. They are scheduled on your iPhone, by your iPhone. There is no server, no push, and no message sent to your device from us, which also means we cannot see whether one was delivered. Your phone has to be on and running for a scheduled reminder to appear. Check these, in this order.

1. Permission. Aurabill asks for notification permission only after you save your first subscription, never on launch. If you dismissed it, open Aurabill’s Settings tab. The Reminders row shows the current state and, if permission was denied, takes you to the system settings page for Aurabill.

2. Scheduled Summary. If Aurabill is included in your Scheduled Summary, reminders are held until the summary is delivered. A renewal warning that arrives at 6pm is not much of a warning. Remove Aurabill from the summary.

3. Focus modes. Aurabill’s reminders are ordinary notifications, not time-sensitive ones. That is a choice: the time-sensitive level is for things like a smoke alarm, and a Netflix renewal is not that. The consequence is that any Focus mode will silence them. If you want renewal warnings to break through a Focus, add Aurabill to that Focus’s allowed apps.

4. Delivery style. In the system notification settings for Aurabill, check that Allow Notifications is on and that the alerts are not set to Deliver Quietly.

5. Open the app now and then. Aurabill schedules one reminder per subscription, for the next renewal only, and schedules the next one when you open the app. It does no background work at all, on purpose. If you have not opened Aurabill in several months, the next reminder in the chain may not be scheduled yet. Opening the app for two seconds fixes it.

What you cannot change yet: reminders fire at 09:00 local time, and the lead time is set by the billing cycle. Weekly gets 1 day, monthly and quarterly get 3 days, and every six months or yearly gets 7 days. Trials get two, at 3 days and 1 day. There is no setting for any of that today. If you want one, say so in an email; that is how it gets prioritized.

Reminders also do not survive a delete and reinstall, and they do not travel to a new iPhone, because they only ever existed on the old one.

A trial only gets warnings if Aurabill knows it is a trial. It has no view of your Apple account and no way to discover one on its own.

Check the subscription itself. Open it, tap Edit, and look at the Free trial toggle. Turn it on, set the date the trial ends, and enter the price you will be charged afterward. You immediately get two warnings: one 3 days before and one the day before, each naming the exact amount about to be charged.

If you imported it, check it came in as a trial. Reading trial state off a screenshot is the least reliable part of the import, so we do not claim it is automatic. Fix it by hand and the warnings behave normally from then on.

If the post-trial price is unknown, Aurabill says “price unknown, check it before the trial converts” rather than inventing a number. Fill it in and the warnings name the real amount.

If the trial ends in the next day or two, the 3-day warning has nowhere earlier to go, so Aurabill moves it forward to the next 9am rather than skipping it. That can put both warnings on the same morning. A warning is only dropped when 9am on the day the trial ends has already gone by, so adding a trial on its final afternoon gets you neither.

Also check permission, Scheduled Summary, and Focus, above. All three silence trial warnings the same way. To be blunt about the limit: Aurabill cannot stop a charge, cannot see that one happened, and cannot get your money back. It can only tell you in advance, using what you told it.

Open the subscription, tap Edit, and change it. A few things worth knowing about how it recalculates.

The next renewal date you set becomes the anchor. Every future date is computed as that date plus a whole number of cycles, never by stepping forward from the last one. That is why a subscription anchored on the 31st stays on the 31st instead of drifting to the 28th after a February. Correcting the date once corrects the whole series.

Prefilled prices are typical prices, not your price. Catalog prices carry an “as of” date and are captioned as typical. Your promotional rate, your annual plan, and last month’s increase are all invisible to us. Nothing is looked up online, ever.

Reminders re-plan themselves as soon as you save. You do not need to do anything else.

Totals recalculate at full precision and round once at display, so a category row and the grand total are each rounded from the real numbers rather than from each other.

If a subscription is missing from your totals entirely, check its currency. Aurabill converts using an exchange rate table bundled inside the app, covering 19 currencies, and it refuses to guess at 1:1 for a currency it has no rate for. Those subscriptions appear in the list but are excluded from converted totals with a visible footnote saying how many were left out.

Editing a price does not change the savings figure of something you already cancelled. That number was frozen at the moment you cancelled, deliberately, so later edits cannot inflate it.

Direct cancel pages exist for about two dozen services. They open in Safari inside the app, so your saved passwords fill in normally and your credentials stay in Safari’s process, not ours. We cannot see the page, cannot read what you type, and never sign in on your behalf.

Companies move these pages, and sometimes they move them on purpose. If a link 404s, lands on a homepage, or drops you into a login loop: email us the service name and what you saw — link fixes ship with content updates, and a broken link on a widely used service gets an out-of-band update rather than waiting for the next release. Meanwhile, go through the account settings on the company’s own site, looking for Account, then Membership or Plan, then Cancel. And if Apple bills it, the web page will not help you anyway — see the next answer.

We only ever open https links. If a company’s cancel page is http-only, no button appears rather than sending you to an unencrypted login form.

Because that subscription is marked as billed through Apple, and for those, Apple’s list is the only route that actually stops the charge. Cancelling on the company’s own website does not stop an App Store charge. Every subscription created by the screenshot import is marked this way, since everything on that list is billed by Apple.

The button you get instead names the service, then opens your Apple subscriptions (App Store). One tap to your Apple subscriptions list — tap the service there to cancel. Aurabill cannot cancel it for you, and it does not pretend otherwise. Apple provides no per-service link, which is why the screen tells you exactly which row to look for before you go.

Expected. Aurabill has no connection to Apple, to your bank, or to the company. It cannot find out that you cancelled. You tell it, and it believes you.

Two ways to do that. Answer the prompt: when you come back from your Apple subscriptions list or from a cancel page, Aurabill asks “Did you cancel this?”. The question is saved before you leave, so it still appears even if iOS shut the app down while you were away. Or mark it yourself: open the subscription and tap “I already cancelled it”.

Either one moves it to the Cancelled section and starts counting. You will see two numbers: “Cutting ≈ $X a year”, the annual amount you are no longer paying, and “saved ≈ $Y”, which climbs from the date you cancelled.

Two related notes. Cancelling with Apple normally leaves your access running until the end of the period you already paid for, so the date you cancelled and the date it stops are not the same date. And if you marked something cancelled by mistake, swipe the row and tap Reactivate. The savings counter will drop when you do. That is intended. A number that only goes up is not a real number.

Two separate things, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion.

Your subscription list does not follow you. There is no account, no login, and no sync, so a fresh install starts empty. The only way your data reaches a new iPhone is by restoring that iPhone from a backup of the old one during setup. If you set the new phone up as new, the list is gone. We cannot recover it, because we never had it.

Your purchase does follow you. Purchases are attached to your Apple Account, not to the device. Aurabill Plus is not on sale yet, so today there is nothing to restore. When it ships: install Aurabill, open the Plus screen, tap Restore Purchases, and make sure you are signed in with the same Apple Account that made the purchase. If restore comes back empty, check the Apple Account under Media & Purchases rather than the one you use for iCloud. They are often different, and that is the usual cause.

Family Sharing is planned to be on for both the yearly and the lifetime option, so people in your family group get Plus without paying again. Family Sharing shares the purchase only. It does not share your subscription list, and nobody in your family group can see what you track.

Your data lives in Aurabill’s own protected container on your iPhone, encrypted at rest by iOS along with everything else on the device. There is no server copy. There is no account. There is nothing for us to delete on our end, and no way for us to see it in the first place.

One subscription: swipe the row in the list and delete it. One category: delete it in Settings, then Categories. Its subscriptions are not deleted, they become Uncategorized. Built-in categories cannot be deleted. Everything: delete the app. Touch and hold the icon, then Remove App, then Delete App. That removes the app’s container and every subscription, category, and preference in it. Use Delete App, not Offload App. Offloading keeps the data so it comes back when you reinstall.

About backups, honestly. Aurabill never uploads anything, because it has no code that could. But it also does not opt itself out of your iPhone’s backup. If you use iCloud Backup or back up to a computer, Aurabill’s data is included in that backup exactly the way every other app’s data is. That is Apple’s backup of your device, under your Apple Account, and we have no access to it.

The practical consequences: deleting the app removes the data from your phone and from every backup taken afterward; a backup taken before you deleted the app still contains the data until that backup is replaced or you delete it yourself; restoring a phone from such a backup brings your subscription list back; and to clear it from iCloud as well, manage your device backup in the iCloud settings, or delete the backup. That is entirely on Apple’s side, under your control, not ours.