Most fuel apps assume you fill the tank every time.
I don't. Sometimes I top up twenty dollars' worth on the way somewhere. Sometimes I wait until the light comes on. Every app I tried treated all of it as a full tank and handed me a number that drifted around for no reason I could see.
So I wrote FuelJot. It's a fuel and service log for iPhone and iPad, and the whole point of it is that the number it shows you is one you can actually check.
No account. No ads. No analytics. There isn't a single line of networking code in the app — it couldn't phone home if I wanted it to. Your records sit on your phone, and CSV export is free forever, whether you buy Plus or not.
How it keeps the maths honest
You can only measure fuel economy between two moments when the tank was in the same state. Fill to the brim on Monday, fill to the brim on Friday, and the fuel you put in on Friday is exactly what you burned. That works.
Now put in half a tank on Wednesday. Most apps quietly fold that into the calculation anyway, and your Friday figure comes out wrong. They don't tell you. You just see a number that's a bit off, then a number that's a bit high, and you assume your driving changed.
FuelJot asks how you filled up. Three choices:
- Filled to full — to the brim, or first auto-stop of the pump
- Filled when the low-fuel light came on — however much you put in
- Neither — a partial top-up, or a fixed amount of money
The first two are anchors. Each forms its own chain, and the two chains never mix, so you can switch habits halfway through the year without wrecking the history behind you.
The third isn't an anchor, and FuelJot doesn't pretend it is. That fuel gets carried forward to the next real anchor instead of producing a made-up figure of its own. Forgot to log a stop entirely? Mark the next entry as "missed one before this" and only that stretch is set aside. Everything either side of it still counts.
The longer explanation, with worked examples — worth reading even if you use a different app.
Nothing leaves your phone
There's no FuelJot account because there's no FuelJot server. No analytics, no advertising identifier, no crash reporter, no third-party SDKs. I don't know how many people use this app, and I'm fine with that.
Scanning is the one feature people assume must involve a server. It doesn't. Point the camera at a pump display, a receipt, or your odometer, tap the number you want, and it fills in the field. That recognition runs on your phone using Apple's Vision framework. The photo isn't uploaded and isn't kept.
What costs money
| Free, forever | FuelJot Plus |
|---|---|
| Unlimited vehicles and entries All three fill-up styles Scanning Service records and reminders CSV import and export Cost per fill-up and per 100 miles No ads, no account |
Economy and spending charts Backup to your own iCloud Drive |
Plus is $4.99, once. Not a subscription — you buy it and it's yours. Nothing renews, nothing expires.
CSV export stays free on purpose. A fuel log is only worth anything because it's years long, and I'm not going to be the reason you can't take yours somewhere else.
Small things that matter later
Switch between MPG (US), MPG (UK), L/100 km and km/L any time you want. Everything is stored in metric underneath and converted for display, so changing units doesn't rewrite a single record.
Each entry keeps the currency you logged it in. If you move countries, the old ones stay in the old currency and the amounts are never re-converted — exchange rates move, but what you actually paid that day doesn't.
Service items can be tracked by distance, by time, or both, and it'll tell you when something's due. The app is translated into 12 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Arabic.
What it isn't
FuelJot is new, and it's me on my own. There's no web dashboard. There's no forum full of owners comparing notes about your model. Fuelly has both of those and I'm not going to pretend otherwise — if that's what you're after, go and use Fuelly.
What I've spent my time on is the fill-up maths, keeping your data on your device, and making sure you can always get it back out.
How FuelJot compares with the other fuel apps, including the ones I'd point you towards instead.
Get in touch
I'm Xing Ji. I built FuelJot on my own and I answer the support mail myself, usually within a couple of days: support@getfueljot.com
If a number looks wrong to you, tell me which vehicle and which fill-up. That's normally enough for me to reproduce it.