Your cause,
your receipt.
You are at a counter and the card reader asks if you want to round up for a cause. You would — just not their cause, with their name on it.
Spare Up lets you say yes to your own.
Requires a free CauseLine account
you picked
An illustration of one round up.
- Nothing is charged at the counter.
- Enter, say, or scan.
- Round ups go out at $25, as one donation.
From the counter to the cause.
Pick a cause
Search for a nonprofit or a campaign and make it yours. Every round up goes there until you decide on someone else.
Once, at setupRound up a bill
To the nearest dollar, five or ten — the difference is the gift. Scan it, screenshot it, say it, or let Apple Pay start it for you: five ways in.
Takes a few secondsIt goes at $25
Round ups queue up for that nonprofit. When the queue reaches $25 it goes as one real donation.
Then it repeatsSo why not just make it automatic?
Two reasons. The first is that automating it would mean connecting Spare Up to your bank or your card and watching what you spend — and we don't want that access. You should not have to hand over your financial life to give a dollar away. Spare Up only ever knows the number you hand it.
The second is the whole point of the app. Spare Up is for people who want giving to be easy, not for people who want it hidden. Giving on purpose is the part worth keeping — we just make it fast.
There is one place we do say automatic, and it means something narrower than it usually does. It is not automatic giving. Once a queue reaches $25 and the three days are up, you can have the charge go through without you — if you have set up a payment source and turned that on. The round up at the register is always yours to make. Only the paperwork is automatic.
Five ways to do it. Every one a tap or two.
A paper receipt, an order confirmation on a screen, a tap of Apple Pay, a number you already know. Spare Up takes the bill however it reaches you, and every route lands on the same screen with the amount filled in and one tap left to do.
You have a paper receipt
Point the camera at it — or at the register screen — and Spare Up reads the total. The reading happens on your iPhone; the photo is deleted once the round up is recorded.
You shopped on your phone
Screenshot the checkout page, the order confirmation, or the transaction in Wallet. Spare Up offers your newest screenshot already read, so an online order is one tap from the home screen. Needs photo access. It looks at your Screenshots album only, the newest item only, and only if you took it in the last two hours.
You tapped to pay and kept walking
Set up a Wallet automation once in Shortcuts and Spare Up opens itself right after you pay, without you reaching for it. Some banks report the amount to Shortcuts and some report only the merchant. When yours sends the amount it is already filled in; when it does not, Spare Up opens and asks.
Your hands are full
“Hey Siri, spare up a bill.” It asks what the bill was, you say the number, and the app opens on the confirm screen. Useful when you paid cash, or when the receipt is already in the bag.
You just know the number
Type it. This is the one that always works, and it is still only a few seconds — everything else above exists to save you those seconds, not to replace them.
None of these gives anything away on its own. Each adds a round up to the queue for the nonprofit you picked, you see the number before it counts, and the money does not move until the queue reaches $25 and three days have passed.
Two of those ways read a picture. Neither picture leaves your phone.
No upload, no server, no copy of your shopping.
Point the camera at a receipt or a register screen, or screenshot a checkout page — Spare Up reads the total either way, on your iPhone, with the text recognition built into iOS. The picture is never sent anywhere, because it never needs to be.
iOS's own text recognition does the reading. No network request is made to read a receipt or a screenshot.
The image is not sent to us or to anyone else. What is kept is the bill and the merchant name — the gift has to be a number, and the name is there so you can tell one round up from another.
A photo Spare Up took is deleted once the round up is recorded, or if you back out. A screenshot is yours — it stays in your photos exactly where you left it, never moved, changed or deleted.
Confirmed by you before it counts
Spare Up shows you what it read, on the photo, and you tap a different number if it got it wrong. Nothing becomes a donation until you confirm the total.
A $2 gift sent alone mostly pays a card fee.
Card processing costs about 30¢ per charge plus a percentage, whatever the amount is. On a $1.59 gift that fixed 30¢ alone is nearly a fifth of it, gone before the nonprofit sees a cent. So Spare Up does not send it alone.
Your round ups queue up for that nonprofit, and when the queue reaches $25 it goes as one gift. Same money from you, materially more of it arriving.
Card processing costs a fixed amount per charge — around 30¢ — plus a percentage, whatever the gift. Queuing pays that fixed cost once instead of ten times. Percentages vary by campaign; the 30¢ does not.
A queue can take weeks, and the app never pretends otherwise: it shows what is queued and what has been delivered as two different numbers.
The receipt is in your name.
This is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. It is the reason the question at the register is worth answering with your own.
You give a dollar. The store hands over the money, to a cause the store picked, on a schedule the store set.
You are the donor of record. Your gift, your nonprofit, your receipt — issued to you, in your name.
No, the store is not writing it off — and that is not the interesting part. We do not give tax advice and we make no claim about deductibility; that is between you, your receipt, and your own advisor.
Spare Up is one of several CauseLine apps.
They share one account and, per nonprofit, one queue. A round up here and a touchdown-triggered gift in another app both move the same queue toward the same $25 — and it charges once.
Payment settings live in your CauseLine account, on the web, not in the app — Apple's rules, and honestly the right place for them. More about CauseLine Labs →
Many reasons, one donation.
Next time you're asked to round up, say yes to your own cause.
Spare Up is on TestFlight now. Leave your address and we will send you an invite. iPhone only for the moment.