How to choose a tip tracker app

Six things to check before you commit

Download three apps, log the same shift in each, and see which one you would do again tomorrow. While you are there, check these.

• How many taps to log a shift? Count them. If the date, wage and hours are not pre-filled from last time, you are paying for that every night.
• Is tip-out a real field? Many apps have a tips box and nothing else, which means your hourly rate is wrong by whatever you tip out.
• Does it show a rate, not just a total? Total earnings per shift are nice; earnings per hour are what decide which shifts to take.
• Are there ads? Read the recent one-star reviews of any free tip app. The pattern is ads that got worse, then a paid tier that removed some of them.
• Can you export everything, free? If export is behind the paywall, your own records are the product being sold back to you.
• What happens if you reinstall? If the answer involves an account you might forget the password to, or a server the developer might switch off, that is your tip history on the line.

The data-loss problem

The single most common complaint in the category, across years of reviews, is losing history: an update that wiped the app, a forced account migration that did not migrate, a reinstall that came back empty. For a tool whose entire value is the record, that is the failure that matters.

Tillside's answer is structural rather than a promise. There is no account. Every shift is stored on your iPhone and mirrored to the private database in your own iCloud, which we cannot read and do not run. Reinstall on a new phone signed in with the same Apple Account and the history is back. Export is free, for all of it, so you can keep a copy anywhere you like.

What Tillside does and does not do

It logs shifts fast, with your wage, hours and tip-out rule pre-filled. It shows net tips, total earnings and an hourly rate on every shift, every week and the trailing month. It has a calendar of your days, a free tip calculator for splitting the bill after work, free CSV export, and a delete-everything button that also clears your iCloud copy.

It does not show ads, ask you to create an account, sync to a server we operate, or gate your own data. The free tier shows the last 30 days and one job; Tillside Pro unlocks the full history and unlimited jobs for US$3.99 a month or US$24.99 a year, with a 7-day trial on the yearly plan. Insights charts and widgets are on the way; we would rather ship a ledger you can trust first.