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Barnacle
The subscription tracker that is not a subscription
Barnacle adds up what your subscriptions cost each month and warns you before the next charge lands. No account, no sign-in, no servers: everything lives in a database on your phone. One payment of $5.99. The free version tracks five subscriptions.
I built this after realising I could not answer a simple question: what do I pay every month? Every tracker I tried wanted a monthly fee, my bank login, or both, which is a strange thing to accept from an app whose job is telling you to cancel things.
So Barnacle has no backend. Everything sits in SQLite on the phone. The only network call the app makes is the App Store billing check, and three separate checks hold me to that: a static scan that fails the build if any first-party file names a network primitive, the full 954-test suite running with those globals replaced by traps that throw, and a device run behind mitmproxy before each release.
Here is what that costs you, because it is a real cost and not a footnote. There is no sync and no cloud backup. Moving to a new phone means exporting an encrypted file and importing it on the other side. There is no bank detection either, so you type your subscriptions in, which a 243-service catalogue makes quicker by filling in the usual price once you type a name.
iOS only today. Free to download, five subscriptions on the free version, and $5.99 once for unlimited subscriptions, encrypted export and import, and the app lock. No renewal.
Happy to answer anything, particularly about the local-only architecture or why I decided against sync.
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About Barnacle on Product Hunt
“The subscription tracker that is not a subscription”
Barnacle was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 2 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #156 on the daily leaderboard. Barnacle adds up what your subscriptions cost each month and warns you before the next charge lands. No account, no sign-in, no servers: everything lives in a database on your phone. One payment of $5.99. The free version tracks five subscriptions.
Barnacle was featured in iOS (110.7k followers), Privacy (11.3k followers) and Personal Finance (2.9k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 52.3k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Barnacle?
Barnacle was hunted by Arun Dugganapally. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Barnacle stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Arun Dugganapally
I built this after realising I could not answer a simple question: what do I pay every month? Every tracker I tried wanted a monthly fee, my bank login, or both, which is a strange thing to accept from an app whose job is telling you to cancel things.
So Barnacle has no backend. Everything sits in SQLite on the phone. The only network call the app makes is the App Store billing check, and three separate checks hold me to that: a static scan that fails the build if any first-party file names a network primitive, the full 954-test suite running with those globals replaced by traps that throw, and a device run behind mitmproxy before each release.
Here is what that costs you, because it is a real cost and not a footnote. There is no sync and no cloud backup. Moving to a new phone means exporting an encrypted file and importing it on the other side. There is no bank detection either, so you type your subscriptions in, which a 243-service catalogue makes quicker by filling in the usual price once you type a name.
iOS only today. Free to download, five subscriptions on the free version, and $5.99 once for unlimited subscriptions, encrypted export and import, and the app lock. No renewal.
Happy to answer anything, particularly about the local-only architecture or why I decided against sync.