The problem
A car burns through tens of thousands of dollars of service over its lifetime. The record of all that lives as smudged thermal-paper receipts in the glove box and screenshots in a Viber thread with the mechanic. When the car gets sold, the history evaporates and the buyer eats the risk.
What’s missing outside the US
In the US you can pull a VIN report and see most of what matters in ten seconds. In the Philippines that doesn’t exist, and the same is true across most of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and large parts of Europe and Africa.
Independent shops do the bulk of the work outside warranty and don’t publish service data anywhere. Manufacturer apps go dark the day the warranty expires. The market ends up full of cars no one can verify, and honest sellers eat the discount.
Why we built it
We started with a selfish reason: we wanted a tool we’d trust for our own cars, and nothing here cleared that bar without an account, ads, or a quiet pipe to an analytics vendor.
The bigger reason came after. The resale-provenance gap is worth solving for everyone else in the same situation. If owners hold the record themselves, the record outlives the warranty, the dealership, and the OEM relationship.
How it works
KeepAuto runs on iOS and Mac. iCloud is the entire backend, so there’s no account to create and no server to leak. Every operation works offline; you can log a fuel-up in a basement parking lot and let it sync later.
- On-device receipt parsing
- Apple Vision pulls text out of fuel and service receipts, then Foundation Models structures the result. No image, OCR text, or prompt ever leaves the phone.
- Natural-language logging
- Type “P2,500 oil change for the Fortuner” and you get a structured entry. Handles English and Taglish.
- One write path, four ways in
- Manual form, receipt scan, natural language, chat assistant. They all write through the same validated path so the records line up regardless of how they came in.
- Owner-private sync
- iCloud handles identity and storage. Trip data is local-only and never syncs. The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected and it means it.
- A schema that absorbs reality
- Cars get bought used with missing history. They get modded away from stock. Two drivers share one car. Three years of paper receipts need to go in retroactively. The data model handles all of it.
- Built for everywhere Carfax isn’t
- Defaults to PHP and kilometers, ships in 11 locales, including right-to-left layout for Arabic.
The surprise
A chunk of the early demand came from owners in the US, where Carfax already exists. They asked for KeepAuto anyway, because Carfax is a report you buy at resale and KeepAuto is a tool you live with. Android requests started showing up the same week.
KeepAuto held #2 in the iOS App Store for a few weeks after launch and is still sitting in the Top 10 several weeks in.
What’s next
Owner-signed history exports the next buyer can verify. Then the same model on Android and the web, for the platforms iCloud doesn’t reach.