Introducing Vehicare: A Car Maintenance Log You Never Have to Type Into
Why I built an app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that turns your mechanic’s invoice into a complete service history, without typing a word.
There’s a folder in my glovebox. Every invoice my garage has ever handed me is in there, folded in thirds, in roughly the right order. It holds my car’s entire service history, and it’s almost useless.
When was the brake fluid last changed? How much have I spent on this car since I bought it? Were the tires rotated at the last visit or the one before? The answers are all in that folder. Getting them out means sitting in the driveway, unfolding paper and reading each invoice one after the other.
I built Vehicare so I’d never have to do that again.
TL;DR
Vehicare is an app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that turns the invoice your mechanic hands you into a complete service history, without typing a word. You share the PDF or take a photo of the paper copy, Vehicare reads it, and you check it and save it. From there, it works out what’s due next. It’s free for your first vehicle, and a single payment unlocks the rest. No subscription.
I tried the logging apps. So has everyone.
This isn’t a new idea. There are well over a hundred car maintenance apps on the App Store, and I’ve tried a few of them. They all work the same way: after each trip to the garage, you open the app and type in what was done, what it cost and what the odometer said.
I did that twice. Then I stopped.
I don’t think that makes me unusually lazy. A maintenance log is only worth something when it’s complete, and keeping it complete takes a little bit of discipline every few months, forever. Almost nobody has that. Read the reviews of those apps and you see the same pattern again and again: people log two oil changes and give up. A log with two oil changes in it doesn’t help anyone.
What bugged me is that the typing was never necessary in the first place. The invoice already has everything: the date, the garage, the odometer reading, every job, every part and what each one cost. Someone at the garage already typed all of it. I was just copying it from one place to another.
The invoice does the typing
So that’s how Vehicare works. When you get home from the garage, you share the invoice with it. It can be the PDF they emailed you, a photo of the paper copy, or a scan. Send it from Mail, Files or Photos, drag it onto the app, or paste it.
Vehicare reads it and fills in the visit: the workshop, the date, the odometer, and the work broken out job by job (oil change, brake pads and rotors, tire rotation, cabin air filter), with what each one cost. It sorts every job into one of more than 60 kinds of service, so “Front brake pads” on one invoice and “Plaquettes de frein avant” on another end up as the same thing. If the invoice is for a car it hasn’t met yet, it adds the car too.
Then you look it over. You always get the last word, and you can change anything before it’s saved. It won’t read every invoice perfectly (garages have wildly different ideas about what an invoice should look like), but fixing one field is a lot less work than typing twenty.
The timing turned out to matter more than I expected. The moment you’re most likely to care about your car’s records is right after you’ve paid for a repair, with the invoice still in your hand. That’s exactly when Vehicare asks you for one small gesture, instead of asking you to remember to do it later.
The original invoice stays attached to the visit, so if you ever need to see the actual document, it’s right there.
It works out what’s due next
After reading a few invoices, Vehicare knows two things most apps have to ask you for: what was actually done to your car, and how much you actually drive.
From that, it works out what’s coming: an oil change around November 12, or at 130,000 km, whichever comes first. There’s no maintenance schedule to set up and no intervals to type in. It all comes from the invoices it has already read, and it adjusts with every new one. You can ask Siri what’s due, or let Vehicare remind you.
I think of it as a loop. The invoice writes the record, the record says what’s due, and what’s due brings you back to the garage for the next invoice.
Why not the app from your dealer?
If you bought your car new, there’s a good chance the carmaker gave you an app, and some of them show your service history. It’s a fair question.
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The trouble is that the carmaker’s app only knows about work done at its own dealers, on its own brand. Plenty of us stop going to the dealer once the warranty runs out. Take your car to the independent garage down the street and, as far as that app is concerned, the visit never happened. Own two cars from two brands and you have two apps, each with half the picture. And when you sell the car, the history stays behind.
Vehicare doesn’t care what you drive or where you take it: any make, any age, any garage. When you sell, you can export the whole service history as a PDF and hand it to the buyer. A complete maintenance record is one of the few things that actually helps a used car sell for what it’s worth.
In the US, CARFAX Car Care does some of this on its own by pulling records from shops that report to it, and it’s a good app if you live there. In Canada, where I live, very few people use it, and it isn’t in the App Store in France or the UK at all.
A real Mac app
I do most of my paperwork on a Mac, so Vehicare had to be a real Mac app, not an iPhone app stretched into a window. On the Mac it has a proper menu bar, a table of visits you can sort and work in, and an inspector that shows the original invoice. You can open an invoice with Vehicare from Finder or the Services menu, or use Continuity Camera to scan a paper invoice with your iPhone straight into the Mac app.
When I looked at the competition, I found exactly two native Mac apps for car maintenance, and neither had a single rating. Every other car app that claims to run on a Mac is an iPad app.
It fits in with the rest of your Apple devices, too. Ask Siri how much you’ve spent on the car or when the last service was. Find your vehicles, garages and visits in Spotlight. Use its actions in Shortcuts, or put one on the Action button. Everything stays in sync across your iPhone, iPad and Mac through iCloud.
Your invoices stay yours
A car’s service history says a lot about you: where you live, where you drive, what you can afford. I didn’t want any of that, so I built Vehicare in a way that means I never see it.
Invoices are read on your device by Apple Intelligence. If you turn on the option, an invoice your device can’t finish reading can get help from Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which doesn’t store or share it. Everything you create lives in your own iCloud account. There’s no Vehicare account to create and no sign-in, and the app has no analytics and no trackers. The only thing that ever reaches my server is a VIN, or a year, make and model, when you ask Vehicare to fill in a car’s details. The privacy policy spells it all out in plain words.
A note for the developers reading this: the model that does the reading runs on your iPhone, and it can only hold about 4000 tokens at a time. One dense page of invoice text takes a quarter of that, and the instructions take another big bite, so a long invoice has to be read in parts. Getting reliable results out of it was by far the hardest part of this project. That story deserves its own article, and I’ll write it.
Edit: I now have published that story, available here.
Free to try, one payment, no subscription
Vehicare is free for your first vehicle, invoice reading included. It’s not a trial, and it doesn’t expire. Maintenance reminders are free too. I’ve read too many one-star reviews of apps that promise reminders and then put them behind a paywall.
A single purchase ($19.99 US) unlocks every vehicle you own, lease or rent, lets you export your history as PDF or CSV, and removes the ads. It’s one purchase for iPhone, iPad and Mac. There’s no subscription: not now, not later.
About those ads: the free version shows one small card for another independent app, from Kickstart Exchange, built for indie developers. No ad network, no tracking, nothing that identifies you. And it’s gone the moment you buy.
What you need
- An iPhone or iPad with iOS or iPadOS 26.4 or later, or a Mac with macOS 26.4 or later.
- A device that supports Apple Intelligence, with Apple Intelligence turned on.
Vehicare is in English and French, and it reads invoices written in either. Being from Quebec, handling French invoices properly (commas for decimals, day-first dates and all) was never optional.
Try it with the invoice in your glovebox
The best way to judge Vehicare is to take the most recent invoice out of your glovebox (or your inbox), share it with the app and watch the visit fill in. If it doesn’t earn its place, it cost you nothing.
You’ll find it at vehicare.app, and in French if you prefer.
If an invoice comes out wrong, please send it to me. Every misread invoice teaches me something about how garages write them, and I’m fixing them as they come in.
Happy driving!
P.S. If you give Vehicare a try, I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you also have a folder of invoices in your glovebox.
