Why Skarb is free, and what that means for you
Skarb is free because it is a personal project, and the person who built it pays what it costs to run. There is no catch somewhere else: no paid tier, no ads, no tips, no donations, and your data is not sold.
Most apps that cost nothing make their money somewhere, so it is fair to ask where.
What free means here
Free can mean a lot of things in an app store. Here it means all of these:
- No paid tier of any kind. Every feature on the features page is there for everyone who installs the app. Nothing is held back, and no screen asks you to pay.
- Nothing to buy. There are no purchases inside the app.
- No ads, anywhere in the app.
- No tips and no donations. There is no jar and no button asking for either.
- Your data is not sold, or shared with advertisers. The privacy policy lists every service that touches it, and why.
The about page says the same, in fewer words.
Who pays for it
Skarb is made by one person, an individual developer in Ukraine, who designs it, builds it, and pays its running costs. It is not a company's product, and there are no employees.
Running it does cost money, and it is fair to say where:
- The database that holds your workspaces, and the sign-in that keeps them yours.
- File storage for the attachments you keep on transactions.
- The AI that turns a receipt photo, or a typed or spoken sentence, into a draft. Each one goes to OpenAI, and each request has a small cost.
- Apple's yearly fee to publish an app, and this website's address.
The storage limit: 500 MB for attachments
There is one limit you are likely to meet, and it is on the files you keep. Each person gets 500 MB for attachments: the receipt photos, scans, and PDFs you attach to transactions so the evidence sits beside the money.
- It is per person. The 500 MB counts every file you added, in every workspace you are in or have left. A file counts against whoever added it, so 2 people in the same household see different figures.
- Photos are resized before they are stored. A receipt photo is usually a few hundred KB once the app has resized it, so 500 MB is roughly a thousand receipts.
- A scanned receipt you only use to fill in a transaction does not count. That photo is read once and then discarded. Only a file you attach yourself is kept.
- You can see it. The Storage screen in Profile shows what you have used, for example 312 MB of 500 MB, and lists every file, largest first, so you can delete what you no longer need.
- It warns you early. From 80 percent, the screen says you are running low. A file that would take you past 500 MB is refused before it uploads, until you free some space.
- Nothing else stops. Entries, budgets, sharing, and reports all carry on. Only new attachments wait.
At 312 MB of 500 MB, you have 188 MB left, a little more than a third of the allowance.
There is no way to buy more, and nobody has a larger allowance. Apart from the allowance, a transaction holds up to 5 attachments, each up to 10 MB.
What it means for you
Every feature is yours. There is no feature you can see but not use. If it is on the features page, it is in the app, for everyone.
What you enter is not used to sell you anything. There are no ads to target and no data to sell.
A person answers your email. Write to support@skarb-budget.com, and the person who built the app reads it, usually within a day, sometimes 2.
It is one person's work. Changes come at the pace one person can make them, and a fix waits for that same person. That is the honest cost of free with no business behind it.
You can leave. Deleting your account deletes your sign-in, your files, and every workspace you own, for everyone in it. What you added to someone else's workspace stays there, credited to "Deleted account".
What to do on Monday
- Open Profile, then Storage, and see how much of your 500 MB you have used.
- Read the privacy policy, to see which services handle your data and why.
- Write to support with anything this note did not answer.