The problem
A car burns through tens of thousands of dollars in service over its life. The record of all that lives as faded thermal receipts in the glove box and screenshots buried in a Viber thread with the mechanic. Sell the car and the history just disappears, so the next buyer eats the risk.
Why it’s worse outside the US
In the US you pull a VIN report and see most of what matters in ten seconds. In the Philippines that doesn’t exist, and the same goes for most of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and big parts of Europe and Africa. Independent shops do most of the work out of warranty and publish their service data nowhere. Manufacturer apps go dark the day the warranty ends. So the market fills up with cars nobody can verify, and the honest sellers take the discount.
Why we built it
It started selfishly. We wanted a tool we’d trust for our own cars, and nothing out there cleared that bar without an account, ads, or a quiet pipe to some analytics vendor.
The bigger reason came after. That resale-provenance gap is worth solving for everyone in the same spot. If owners hold the record themselves, it outlives the warranty, the dealership, and the manufacturer relationship.
How it works
KeepAuto runs on iPhone and Mac. iCloud is the whole backend, so there’s no account to create and no server to leak. Everything works offline, so you can log a fuel-up in a basement car park and let it sync later.
- On-device receipt parsing
- Apple Vision reads the text off fuel and service receipts, then Foundation Models turns it into a structured entry. No image, OCR text, or prompt ever leaves your phone.
- Natural-language logging
- Type “P2,500 oil change for the Fortuner” and get a clean entry back. Handles English and Taglish.
- One write path, four ways in
- Manual form, receipt scan, natural language, or chat. They all write through the same validated path, so your records line up no matter how they got in.
- Owner-private by default
- iCloud handles identity and storage. Trip data stays local 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 gaps in the history. They get modded away from stock. Two drivers share one. Three years of paper receipts need to go in after the fact. The data model takes all of it.
- Built for everywhere Carfax isn’t
- Defaults to PHP and kilometers, and ships in 11 locales, including right-to-left layout for Arabic.
The surprise
A good chunk of early demand came from owners in the US, where Carfax already exists. They wanted KeepAuto anyway, because Carfax is a report you buy at resale and KeepAuto is a tool you live with. Android requests showed up the same week.
KeepAuto hit #2 in the iOS App Store after launch and has stayed in the Top 10 for weeks since.
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.