Monthly Shell — Support
Questions, bugs, or anything that reads wrong to you: hello@vidabyte.com. A person reads this inbox.
Why can't I connect my bank?
By design, and permanently. Monthly Shell never asks for bank credentials and has no ability to connect to a financial institution. Typing what you spend is the point — it's the three seconds where you actually notice the money.
There is a longer answer, including who should use a bank-connected app instead, on the no-bank-login page.
Where is my data?
In a database file inside the app, on your phone. There is no account to make and no server of ours. If your iCloud device backups are on, that file is included in them like any other app data, and Apple handles those under its own privacy policy.
There is exactly one way data leaves your phone without you exporting it: Family Sync, which you have to turn on yourself. It sends one profile to your iCloud account — not to us. Everything else stays where it is.
How do I get my data out?
Settings → Back up & export. Two things live there, and both are free forever. Back up everything writes a single file with all of it — activity, budgets, accounts, settings — which you can restore from later. Spreadsheet (CSV) hands you every activity as one row, for opening in a spreadsheet; if you have more than one profile, they're all in the file with a column naming each. Both go out through the share sheet, so where the file lands is your choice.
A backup is worth making once a month, and worth keeping somewhere that isn't this phone. It's the difference between a new phone and a fresh start.
What is the Excel workbook?
A real .xlsx file with four sheets — transactions, a month-by-month summary, every budget, every account — over everything, this year, or the last twelve months. It's part of a subscription. It is built on your phone and, like every other export, goes straight to your share sheet.
The CSV and the full backup above are not behind it and never will be. Every number you put in, you can get out, for nothing.
Can a repeating bill record itself?
Yes, if you ask it to. Open a bill in Settings → Reminders and turn on Log it for me. Each time that bill comes round, the amount you typed is recorded as a spend on the day it was due — and if the bill is linked to a budget, it is tagged to that budget automatically. It is off until you switch it on, and it is set per bill, so you can have it on for rent and off for everything else.
The app is not guessing at anything here: the amount, the date and the budget are the ones you entered on the bill. Every row it writes is an ordinary entry you can change or delete in History like any other. A bill with no amount yet cannot record itself, because there is nothing to record. If you were away and several months went by, it catches up the ones it missed and tells you it did.
What's free, and what does a subscription add?
The app is free and stays free. Everything it has always done is in the free version: logging, budgets, accounts, income, bills, the coach, the widgets, the receipt scanner, the full backup, and the CSV export of everything. The free app makes no network calls at all.
There are two optional subscriptions, in one group, so moving between them is an upgrade rather than a second bill:
- Offline Plus — the Excel workbook and up to five profiles. Still entirely offline; nothing leaves your phone.
- Offline Plus + Family Sync — everything above, plus one shared household. That's the only part of the app that ever leaves the device, and it's off until you turn it on.
Settings → Plus shows both, with Apple's own price for your country. We don't print prices here, because the App Store's is the one that's actually right where you are.
How do I cancel, and what happens if I do?
A subscription is bought from Apple and managed by Apple. Cancel it the way you cancel any other: the Settings app, under your Apple Account, Subscriptions. Settings → Plus in Monthly Shell has a Manage subscription button that takes you to the same place. Refunds are Apple's to give, not ours — we never see your payment details, and we're told one thing only, which is whether a subscription is active.
If it lapses, nothing you entered is deleted. Extra profiles and the workbook become read-only, a household stops syncing, and everything you already have stays on your phone, readable, exportable and backed up as before. Renew and it picks up where it left off.
What are Profiles?
Separate sets of books on one phone — up to five — so two lives that shouldn't be added together aren't. Personal and freelance, say, or a household kept apart from your own money.
Budgets, income, accounts, activity and bills belong to the profile you're in. Appearance, the coach, reminders and your subscription are shared across all of them. Settings → Profiles is where you add, rename and switch, and when you only have one profile the switcher hides itself entirely. Profiles are part of a subscription.
What is Family Sync?
One profile — one set of budgets, income, accounts, activity and bills — kept in step between the people who live in it. A household is a profile, and only that profile syncs.
It runs on your own iCloud, which is Apple's, not a server of ours. We operate none. The data is encrypted on your phone before it goes, with keys held by you and the people you invited, so Apple stores it without being able to read it and neither can we. Apple's iCloud terms and privacy policy apply to it while it's there, alongside ours.
It is off until you switch it on, it needs iCloud to be signed in on the phone, and it's part of the Family subscription. One person pays for a household; everyone they invite joins free. Before anything is shared, a screen tells you exactly what leaves and what doesn't, and you have to say yes to it.
How do I start a household and invite someone?
Settings → Family Sync → Start a household. Read the consent screen, pick which profile to share — an existing one, or a new empty one, so your own books can stay private to this phone — give the household a name, and it's made.
Then tap Invite someone. That opens your share sheet with a link, and you send it however you like — Messages, AirDrop, mail. There's no code to type and no email address to hand over; the app never reads your contacts. People appear in the household list once they've accepted, and their names show only if they've allowed themselves to be looked up.
How do I join a household somebody else started?
Install Monthly Shell first, then tap the link they sent you. It opens the app and brings you to Settings → Family Sync to finish. You'll be shown the same consent screen the person who started it saw, and nothing moves in either direction until you agree to it. Decline and you simply leave the share; getting back in needs a new link.
Joining is free. You don't need a subscription of your own — the person who started the household pays for it.
How do I leave a household, or shut one down?
All three are on Settings → Family Sync, and none of them deletes anything from anybody's phone.
- Leave household — for someone who joined. Your copy stays on your phone as an ordinary profile. Nothing new arrives, and nothing you logged is removed from anybody else.
- Stop sharing — for the person who started it. Everyone keeps what's already in it, as an ordinary profile on their own phone.
- Delete from iCloud — for the person who started it. This removes the shared copy Apple holds. Every member keeps the copy already on their phone.
If you're deleting the app and you used Family Sync, do Delete from iCloud first — otherwise that copy stays in your iCloud after the app is gone.
I deleted the app. Can you recover my data?
No — and that's the honest cost of an app that stores nothing about you. Deleting the app deletes the database. If you restore your phone from a backup that included Monthly Shell, or restore the backup file from Settings → Back up & export, the data comes back with it. We hold nothing, so there's no request to make of us.
Does the receipt scanner upload my photos?
Never. The photo is read on your device and discarded; only the number you confirm is saved. You can decline camera access entirely — the keypad does everything the scanner does.
Why did the app go quiet?
That's the coach working as intended. It only speaks when it has something true to say — one message a day at most. You can pick a chattier style, or silence, in Settings → Coach, along with quiet hours.
What does "Balance" mean exactly?
Your projected monthly income, minus what you've spent this month, minus what you've deliberately set aside into accounts, plus anything you chose to carry over. It resets on the 1st. It is an estimate built from what you entered — your bank statement is the authority.
I tapped an invite link and nothing happened.
Almost always this is Monthly Shell not being installed yet. The link is meant to open the app, so install it first, then tap the link again — it will bring you to Settings → Family Sync to finish joining. If the app is installed and the link still does nothing, ask the person to open Settings → Family Sync and send a fresh one from Invite someone.
It says this phone isn't signed in to iCloud.
Family Sync keeps a household on your own iCloud, so it needs iCloud to be available on the phone. Sign in, or allow iCloud, in the Settings app, then come back. That's a setting on the phone, not something this app can change.
Nothing breaks in the meantime. The profile stays on the phone and the rest of the app works exactly as it did.
Our household stopped syncing.
If the Family subscription of the person who started the household has lapsed, syncing pauses and the household screen says so on every phone. Nothing is deleted. Everyone keeps everything already in it, and it all keeps working locally; syncing resumes when the subscription does.
If the subscription is fine, check iCloud is signed in on both phones, then tap Check now at the bottom of the household screen. The line above it — when the phone last sent, last received, and how many rows are waiting — is usually enough to tell which side is stuck.
I got a new phone. How do I get my subscription back?
Sign in to the same Apple Account, then open Settings → Plus and tap Restore purchases. That asks Apple what you already bought; there's no account of ours to sign into.
Your data is a separate matter, because it lives on the phone rather than with us: restore the new phone from a device backup, or use Settings → Back up & export → Restore from a backup with the file you saved.
Something looks wrong / I found a bug.
Email hello@vidabyte.com with what you expected and what happened. Screenshots help. There's no crash reporter or analytics in the app, so your report is genuinely how we find out.