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Suber

A native macOS menu-bar app for tracking your subscriptions.
Built with Swift and SwiftUI.

About

Suber lives in your macOS menu bar and tracks every subscription you pay for — Netflix, iCloud, ChatGPT, that forgotten gym app — so renewal dates and total monthly spend are always one click away. Works across all your Macs with iCloud sync, speaks 20+ currencies, speaks English + 简体中文, and doesn't send your data anywhere.

v1.6.0 — Autopilot — Suber now works in the background. Watch reads billing receipts from Apple Mail, Sense flags price rises and new subs you forgot about, Act opens the cancel page in one tap and confirms the cancellation actually went through. See the Autopilot section below.

   

Features

Autopilot (v1.6) — Watch · Sense · Act

• 📬 Mail Watchdog — opt in once, Suber reads renewal / invoice / trial-ending emails from Apple Mail in the background. Daily scan via NSBackgroundActivityScheduler. Privacy: only amounts and dates persist; raw email bodies never reach disk.
• 🔔 Change Sentinel — flags price rises, new subs you forgot about, and duplicate charges. Menu-bar badge shows the unread count; one grouped notification per scan. Decision-prompt rows surface the delta % and annual impact so you act in seconds, not minutes.
• ✂️ One-Tap Cancel — built-in cancel-URL map for 40+ services (Netflix, Spotify, ChatGPT, iCloud+, 爱奇艺, …). Suber opens the cancel page in your browser, you cancel there, then Suber verifies on the next billing day and tells you "Netflix cancelled — you'll save $215/year." If the cancel didn't take, you get a clear "Netflix didn't cancel — still active" warning instead of a silent loss.

Daily-driver basics

• Menu-bar app — always one click away, never in your Dock
• Calendar view — monthly grid with billing-date indicators, per-day detail popup, pending-cancel countdown
• List view — searchable across name / category / URL / notes, sortable by next bill / name / amount / date added, filterable by status
• Dashboard — headline monthly spend, 6-month trend chart, category breakdown, top subscriptions
• Widgets — small (monthly spend) and medium (upcoming bills) home-screen widgets
• iCloud sync — subscriptions, settings, and the v1.6 Autopilot change log stay in sync across Macs
• Multi-currency — 20+ currencies with automatic exchange-rate conversion
• Image auto-fill — drop a receipt or email screenshot into the add form; Vision-based OCR extracts the name and price
• Bank-CSV import — Alipay / WeChat Pay / generic CSV → recurring-charge detection
• Bilingual — English + 简体中文 (auto-selects from your macOS Preferred Languages)
• Siri / App Intents — "Add a Netflix subscription", "What's my monthly spend"
• Notifications — local reminders 1 / 2 / 3 / 5 / 7 days before each bill, configurable
• JSON export / import — local backup and restore; also imports from the Suber Chrome extension
• Light / dark — follows system appearance
• Typography — ships with Space Grotesk

Data Safety (v1.9.0)

After a v1.8.0 bug overwrote one user's nine real subscriptions with a stale snapshot, v1.9.0 reworked persistence so a single bad write can't take your data with it. There are now four independent layers between you and data loss, and each is recoverable from the other three:

1. Live store — <App Group container>/Library/Preferences/Suber/suber-subscriptions.json. Atomic writes; the widget reader never sees a partial file.
2. Local rotating backups — every save also writes a millisecond-timestamped snapshot to …/Suber/Backups/ and prunes to the most recent 10 per key. Three keys are protected: subscriptions, settings, and the change log.
3. iCloud Key-Value sync — opt-in (recommended at first launch). Pushes the same blob to your iCloud account so a fully wiped Mac can re-hydrate from any other Mac. Apple stores it; Suber's servers see nothing.
4. Restore from backup UI — Settings → Data → Restore from backup… lists every recoverable source (local rotating, iCloud, even the legacy v1.6.x plist if you've kept one) and restores explicitly on user confirm. Restore itself triggers a fresh local backup, so a misclick is reversible.

If you ever see your subscription list go empty or revert to old data, don't add anything new — open Settings → Data → Restore from backup, pick the right snapshot, confirm. Your previous (possibly corrupted) state becomes another rotating backup before the restore completes.

The full architecture (and the disabled LegacyDataMigration that prompted v1.9.0) is documented in Sources/Services/DataBackupManager.swift and Sources/Services/LegacyDataMigration.swift.

Install

Grab the latest Suber-X.Y.Z.dmg from the latest release, mount it, and drag Suber.app into Applications. Launch from Applications.

Builds are signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple — Gatekeeper lets them open directly, no right-click-workaround needed.

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Current builds are Apple Silicon only.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/createpjf/suber-macos.git
cd suber-macos

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate

xcodebuild build \
  -project Suber.xcodeproj -scheme Suber -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath .build
# Product at .build/Build/Products/Release/Suber.app

The scripts/build-dmg.sh script wraps build + DMG packaging for local testing. Proper distribution additionally requires a Developer ID Application certificate and Apple notarization (see Apple's Notarizing macOS Software Before Distribution).

Note: xcodegen generate regenerates Suber.xcodeproj from project.yml and won't preserve any provisioning profile or signing identity selections you've made in Xcode. After regenerating, reopen the project in Xcode and re-select your team in Signing & Capabilities.

Project structure

Sources/
├── SuberApp.swift                     # App entry (MenuBarExtra + URL scheme)
├── Info.plist
├── Models/
│   ├── Constants.swift                # Theme, AppFont, currencies, categories
│   ├── KnownServices.swift            # Recognized service metadata
│   ├── Settings.swift
│   └── Subscription.swift
├── Services/
│   ├── BillingCalculator.swift        # Next-billing-date logic
│   ├── CloudSyncService.swift         # iCloud Key-Value Store sync
│   ├── ExchangeRateService.swift      # FX rates for multi-currency
│   ├── HotkeyService.swift            # (dormant) global shortcut
│   ├── ImageCache.swift               # Memory / disk / network favicon cache
│   ├── ImageRecognitionService.swift  # Vision-based OCR for receipt drop-zone
│   ├── NotificationService.swift      # Local reminders
│   ├── StorageService.swift           # JSON persistence + export/import
│   ├── SubscriptionTextParser.swift
│   ├── UpdateService.swift            # GitHub release check
│   └── URLSchemeHandler.swift         # suber:// deep links
├── Intents/
│   ├── AddSubscriptionIntent.swift    # Siri / Shortcuts
│   └── GetSpendIntent.swift
├── Utilities/
│   ├── CurrencyFormatter.swift
│   └── DateHelpers.swift
├── ViewModels/
│   ├── DashboardViewModel.swift
│   ├── SettingsStore.swift
│   └── SubscriptionStore.swift
└── Views/
    ├── MenuBarView.swift              # Root tab container
    ├── TopBarView.swift
    ├── CalendarView.swift
    ├── CalendarDayCellView.swift
    ├── DayDetailView.swift
    ├── DashboardView.swift
    ├── ListView.swift
    ├── SubCardView.swift
    ├── SubscriptionFormView.swift
    ├── SettingsView.swift
    └── Components/
        ├── EmailParseView.swift
        ├── FilterBarView.swift
        ├── ImageDropZoneView.swift
        ├── LogoView.swift
        ├── SearchBarView.swift
        └── ToggleRow.swift

SuberWidget/
├── SuberWidget.swift                  # Widget bundle entry
├── SmallSpendWidget.swift
├── MediumUpcomingWidget.swift
└── WidgetDataProvider.swift

Assets.xcassets/
├── AppIcon.appiconset/
└── MenuBarIcon.imageset/

Tests/
├── BillingCalculatorTests.swift
├── StorageServiceTests.swift
└── SubscriptionStoreTests.swift

Tech stack

• Swift 5.9 · SwiftUI · macOS 14+
• MenuBarExtra with .window style for the popover UI
• WidgetKit for home-screen widgets
• App Intents for Siri and Shortcuts integration
• NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore for iCloud sync
• Vision + CoreImage for receipt / screenshot OCR
• UserDefaults + Codable for JSON persistence
• NSCache + disk cache for favicon images (3-tier: memory → disk → network)
• URL scheme (suber://) for deep links
• xcodegen for project generation from project.yml
• Space Grotesk custom font

Author

createpjf — @createpjf

Companion to the Suber Chrome Extension.

License

MIT © createpjf