Carnet
The permanent record of a restoration.
Every part, every receipt, every hour, every photograph — kept on your iPhone, working with no signal, and printed as provenance when you sell.
A restoration takes years.
Its history ends up in a shoebox.
Receipts on thermal paper that fades to nothing. A spreadsheet somebody started in the first winter and stopped updating in the second. Four thousand photographs in a camera roll, in no order, with no captions.
Carnet keeps it in one place, in the order it happened. Record each job with what it cost, how long it took, and what went into it: service, repair, parts fitted, milestone or note. Nothing to file afterwards, because filing it is what you were doing.
Every figure on this page comes from a synthetic demonstration record, authored for the app’s design files. It is not anyone’s car.
Part number. Supplier.
The two fields that matter.
In two years you will not remember which water pump fitted, or who had it in stock. Those are the fields a buyer looks for, and they are the difference between a record and a diary.
Part numbers and chassis numbers are set in a monospaced face throughout, so a transposed digit is visible rather than plausible.
Currencies stack.
They never merge.
Sourcing a water pump from Germany and a carburettor from Italy inside one project is ordinary. So the totals say €12,480.50 and £1,240.00, one under the other, and never a single invented figure in between.
There is no exchange rate in Carnet. A rate would need a network, it would be wrong by the time you read it, and it would quietly rewrite what you actually paid. What you paid is the record.
Photographs, attached to the job they belong to.
Thermal paper fades; a photograph of an invoice taken today does not. Attach as you go and they arrive in the dossier already numbered, already captioned, already cross-referenced to the work.
Plate 08 is the one screen in Carnet that does not follow the colour scheme — you look at a photograph against dark either way. The hatched wells are where your photographs go: these are the app’s design files, and the demonstration record they carry has never had a real car in it.
By date, or by odometer.
Both repeating.
A car driven four times a year still needs servicing properly, and a calendar is the wrong instrument for it. Set a reminder at a mileage and it waits there until the reading arrives.
Overdue is the only thing in Carnet that is ever allowed to go red. Everything else stays on the page, in ink.
“Where did I get that bearing?”
Search runs across every vehicle at once: part numbers, suppliers, notes and captions. It is how a four-year record stays usable in its fourth year rather than its first.
The provenance dossier.
This is the thing you are buying.
Documented provenance adds real money to a classic sale, and a folder of faded till receipts is not documented provenance. Carnet prints the whole history as five pages: a cover, the work in order, a parts index, a photographic section with numbered plates, and a receipt index the work history cross-references by number.
Selling it?
Throw one switch and every figure leaves the document — parts, receipts and totals together. There is no reading of that switch where the buyer still learns what you paid for a water pump.
Try it. Watch the parts index and the cost summary. Hours, dates and plate numbers stay, because those are the provenance.
A plate number is assigned once and never renumbered — so a dossier you exported last year and a dossier you export tomorrow refer to the same photograph by the same number, and the copy in a buyer’s folder stays true.
Made on the phone.
In the garage. With no signal.
The dossier is rendered on the device. There is no server to send your record to, and no queue to wait in. Choose what goes in, and it is a PDF you can print, email from your own account, or hand over on paper with the keys.
Nineteen languages at release,
including the layout.
Not a translated menu bar over an English app. Dates, currency formats, plural rules and the direction the page runs in. Arabic and Hebrew mirror the whole interface, because a logbook you read backwards is not localised.
Being straight about this: the nineteen locales are built and proofed in the design, and the translations ship in the first release. Plates 18 and 19 are the layout proofs, which is exactly what they were drawn to be.
Garages are metal boxes
and basements.
Everything works with no connectivity: entries, photographs, reminders, search and the export. Not “works offline and syncs later”: there is nothing to sync to.
There is no account, no sign-up and no email address. The record itself never leaves your iPhone. Your photographs are files in the app’s own storage, and you can see exactly how much room they take.
Read the privacy policy. It is short, because there is almost nothing to say.
Bought once.
Not rented.
Download Carnet and your first vehicle is free, permanently — a full record, a full history, no trial clock. Unlock once for the rest of the garage, the provenance dossier, reminders, and search across every vehicle.
Territory prices are Apple’s, derived from the US base. The ten-year figure is arithmetic on a common subscription price, not a quote from any particular app.
IPHONE · IOS 17 OR LATER · NO SUBSCRIPTION
Questions worth asking first
What happens to my record if you disappear?
It stays on your phone, and it keeps working. Carnet has no server, so there is no service to shut down. An app that has already been bought and installed does not stop functioning because its developer stopped.
The dossier is an ordinary PDF and your photographs are ordinary image files. Both outlive the app.
Is my data backed up anywhere?
Through your own iPhone backup (iCloud Backup, or an encrypted backup to a computer), exactly like any other app’s data. Carnet never uploads anything itself.
The trade is deliberate and it is worth stating plainly: no server also means no server-side copy. Keep your phone backed up, and export the dossier at the milestones that matter.
Will it convert my currencies for me?
No, and it is the one feature request that will always be declined. A conversion needs a rate, a rate needs a date and a network, and the result would be a number you never paid sitting in a document a buyer relies on. Carnet records what left your account.
Can I use it for a car that is finished?
Yes, and for maintenance after the restoration. Entries are dated by you, not by when you typed them, so a decade of old receipts can go in at the dates they actually happened.
Is there an Android version, or a web version?
No, and none is planned. Carnet is a small app built by one person; doing one platform properly is the whole reason it can work offline, keep no account and cost one price.
What does the unlock actually cover?
The second vehicle onwards, the provenance dossier, reminders, and search across every vehicle. The first vehicle, its full history, its photographs and its receipts are free and stay free.
It is a one-time purchase on your Apple Account, restorable on your other devices, and it is not a subscription.
I have a problem, or a request.
Write to steadyhabit.support@gmail.com, or read the support page first; it covers backups, restoring a purchase, missing photographs and getting your record out.