Family Sharing (Beta): One Subscription, Up to 4 Devices — No Cloud Required

Today we're launching the most requested feature in ReceiptIQ's history: Family Sharing. One subscription now unlocks ReceiptIQ Premium on up to 4 devices — and true to everything we believe about privacy, your family's receipts sync directly between your phones, over your home WiFi. No account to create. No server in the middle. Ever.

One Household, One Ledger, One Subscription

Households share expenses — groceries bought by one person, utilities paid by another, a pharmacy run by a third. Until now, each family member's receipts lived on their own phone, and only one person had the full picture.

With Family Sharing, every paired device sees the same receipts, the same categories, the same budgets, and the same charts. Scan a grocery receipt on your phone, and it appears on your partner's phone the next time you sync. The monthly spending chart is identical everywhere, because it's computed from identical data.

How It Stays Private: Device-to-Device Sync

Most family-sharing features work by uploading everyone's data to a company server. We built ours differently.

How to Set Up Family Sharing

On the subscriber's phone (the "family owner"):

1. Update ReceiptIQ to version 2.1.0 from the App Store
2. Open Settings → Family Sharing
3. Tap Create Family
4. Tap Add Device (Show QR) — a QR code appears

On the family member's phone:

1. Install ReceiptIQ (the free download is all you need — premium comes from the family)
2. Open Settings → Family Sharing
3. Tap Join a Family and scan the owner's QR code
4. Keep both apps open for a few seconds — that's it. The member's phone now has full Premium access.

Syncing Day to Day

Whenever family members are on the same WiFi network with the app open on both phones, tap Sync with Family Now in Settings → Family Sharing on either phone. ReceiptIQ also performs a quiet automatic sync at launch when it spots another family device on the network.

• Receipts merge in both directions — newest edit wins if the same receipt was changed on two phones
• Categories and budgets follow the family owner's setup, so everyone's charts group spending identically
• Receipt photos transfer too, so any phone can pull up the original image
• Deletions propagate — remove a duplicate on one phone and it disappears from all of them

Fair, Honest Subscription Rules

We designed the subscription mechanics to be predictable, with no surprises:

• Up to 4 devices total per family (the owner plus 3 members)
• Family members don't pay anything — premium is inherited from the owner's subscription
• If the owner cancels, the family stays paired, but each device returns to the free tier when the paid period runs out
• Re-subscribing restores everyone automatically on the next sync — no re-pairing needed
• The owner can remove a device or disband the family at any time; members can leave at any time. Everyone keeps the data already on their phone.

Why This Matters

Every design decision in Family Sharing follows from one principle: your financial life belongs on your devices, not on ours. We could have shipped this feature a lot faster with a cloud database. Instead we built device-to-device sync, offline cryptographic subscription verification, and QR pairing that can't be hijacked by a screenshot — so that "family sharing" never has to mean "sharing with a company, too."

It's available today, in all six languages ReceiptIQ supports, included with every existing subscription at no extra cost.