Help & support

For BurnRate 1.0 · Questions this page does not answer: support@burnrate-app.uk

What BurnRate is

BurnRate is a calm cockpit for your recurring commitments. You put your subscriptions in and it shows your current burn rate, keeps renewals visible, and walks you through one short review a month. It looks forward, not back: it never asks you to reconstruct history, only to decide what happens next.

You enter subscriptions yourself, by hand or from a CSV file. That is deliberate: no guessed lists, and by the time your list is in, you know exactly what is on it.

The two pages

The Dashboard is your front page and answers one question at a glance: what am I burning? The teal tile carries your monthly commitment and your yearly burn rate. "You have" counts active subscriptions. "Planned savings" is what you would stop paying if every cancellation you have planned goes through. Below that: essentials against the rest, what is coming up in the next 30 days (red means within a week), where the money goes by category, and where it comes from by payment source.

Your subscriptions is where decisions live. One list, two controls:

• Active / Paused / Cancelled - every subscription has a home, whatever its state.
• Combining filters - Need, Category, and Paid from menus, plus a ✂ Planned chip that shows just the ones you have marked to cancel. A ✕ clears the lot.

Rows stay calm on purpose: the colour edge is the category, one quiet line carries the detail, and the right side answers how much, and when. A coral ✂ next to a date means you have planned to cancel it. Active subscriptions sort soonest renewal first: decision order.

Your first five minutes

Add a subscription

1. Name - the tile letter and colour fill in automatically.
2. Category - pick from your list or create one on the spot. Categories are yours: rename, recolour, add, or delete them in Settings → Your lists.
3. Need - be honest. Essential: life or work depends on it. Keeper: earns its place. Nice-to-have: the first place to look when you want money back.
4. Price and billing cycle - what it charges and how often; monthly and yearly figures derive automatically.
5. Paid from - pick from your managed list. Rename a payment source once in Settings and every subscription follows.
6. Next renewal - the one date that matters.
7. Your note - a message to your future self: "watched twice since June."

Or import a spreadsheet

Settings → Import a CSV. A help sheet explains the columns first, and you can save a blank template to fill in. Friendly headers work ("App name", "Price", "Renews"), new category names are created automatically, and you confirm a preview before anything changes.

Download the blank template (CSV) - the same file the app saves, with two example rows to replace with your own. Fill it in with any spreadsheet app, export or save as CSV, and import it.

The monthly review

Tap ✂ Start monthly review. The deck holds your non-essential subscriptions plus anything renewing soon, most urgent first, and it says what it skips ("Reviewing 10 of 14 - essentials not due soon are skipped"). Each card is one honest, binary decision:

• 💚 Keep it - no change.
• ✂ Plan to cancel - a flag and a savings projection. Nothing is cancelled automatically.

Swipe right to keep, left to plan a cancel. A stamp appears across the card as you drag, and the header keeps score: planned savings so far, plus a running tally. Mis-swiped? Undo brings the card back. Exit any time - decisions keep.

Pausing, cancelling, deleting

Tap any subscription for its detail: cost, billing cycle, next renewal, payment source, and the year ahead - its projected cost per month for the next 12, where yearly plans spike in their renewal month. The buttons match the state it is in:

• Active offers Plan to cancel and Pause. Paused means out of your totals until you resume: the saving is real, so the numbers say so.
• Paused offers Resume and Mark as cancelled.
• Cancelled offers Reactivate and Delete. Cancelled subscriptions stay visible in their tab but count for nothing.
• Deleted subscriptions wait in Settings → Recently deleted for 30 days, where you can reinstate them or remove them for good.

Settings worth knowing

• Your lists - manage Categories and Payment sources (renames propagate everywhere), and visit Recently deleted.
• Notifications - the master "Allow nudges" switch, then your choices: renewal reminders, planned-cancellation alerts, and the monthly review reminder, each with its own toggle. Nudges arrive quietly by default; open system Settings from here if you want banners or sounds.
• Celebrate savings - streak and milestone moments after reviews; off keeps just the numbers.
• Your data - import from CSV, export your list as CSV any time, and save a blank template.

Sync across devices

Sign into the same iCloud account on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and your list follows you. There is no BurnRate account and no BurnRate server: sync runs through your own iCloud, and the data stays yours. If a device is offline, changes catch up the next time it is not.