Most product pages are a list of things an app does. This one is a list of three things Amperlo does not do and is not going to start doing: it will not log petrol cars, it will not find you a charger, and it will not ask for your car manufacturer’s login.
None of those is a gap waiting for a quiet quarter. Each was considered, and each was turned down for a reason that has more to do with the quality of the numbers Amperlo produces than with how busy the feature list looks. If one of the three is a deal-breaker for you, it is much better that you find out here than three weeks into a trial.
It will not log petrol or diesel
Amperlo tracks electric cars. Petrol appears in exactly one place, as a baseline you configure so that the savings figure has something to be measured against, and never as a second kind of log. There is no place to enter litres, no fuel-receipt parsing, no mpg log.
That baseline is two numbers: a pump price in pence per litre and a fuel economy in miles per gallon, which together give a petrol cost per mile that your real charging costs are compared with. It works because you chose both figures and can defend both figures. We have written about why an honest baseline beats a brochure mpg at more length elsewhere, and the short version is that a savings number inherits the credibility of whatever you fed it.
Building a full petrol log alongside would double the surface area of the app to serve a comparison that already works with two settings fields. Worse, it would quietly change what Amperlo is for. The cost-per-mile modes, the VAT treatment, the tariff and discount detection are all built around the specific shape of a charging receipt — a kWh figure, a rate, a network, a time of day. A litres-and-pumps receipt has none of that structure, and the parsing that makes the electric side work would have nothing to grip. Bolting a second fuel type on would mean either a second set of everything or a lowest-common-denominator version of both.
So the honest position is the one in the FAQ: if you run a mixed household and want one ledger covering both cars, Amperlo is the wrong tool. If the petrol car is the thing you used to drive and now want to measure yourself against, it is exactly the right one.
It will not find you a charger
Finding a working plug and recording what that plug cost are two different jobs that happen to occur near each other in time. Zap-Map and PlugShare do the first one well, they have been doing it for years, and Amperlo does not try to compete with them. Use one of those to get plugged in, then send the receipt here.
The deeper reason is that the two jobs want different things from the data. A charger map is most useful when it is current: which bays are live right now, what the tariff is this afternoon, which network has the best rate near you. A logbook is most useful when it is permanent. If a motorway rapid charge cost £36 on a wet Tuesday in February, that is what it cost, and it stays £36 in your records forever — regardless of whether a cheaper bay turned out to be two junctions further on. Hindsight is a useful thing to have, but it is not a ledger entry.
Amperlo does keep a catalogue of known tariffs — the Be.EV Mega Plan at 39p, Instavolt off-peak at 55p between 8pm and 7am, and others like them — but note what it is for. When a parsed rate and time of day match an entry, the session gets that tariff tagged automatically, so your history says which tariff you were actually on. It is a labelling tool for charges that already happened, not a shopping tool for charges you have not made yet. The distinction matters: one is a record, the other is a recommendation, and recommendations are where the trouble starts.
There is also the question of whose side the software is on. A charger finder eventually has to decide which network to show you first, and the parties with an interest in that answer tend to be the ones with a budget. Amperlo has no view on where you charge. It only cares what you paid once you did, which keeps the incentives simple and keeps the ranking problem from ever arriving.
The same reasoning applies to marina shore power. Amperlo tracks prepaid blocks — the lump you buy at the berth and burn down over a run of nights — because that is electricity you paid for and need to account for. It will not become a directory of marinas, for the same reason it will not become a directory of chargers.
It will not ask for your car’s login
Several logbooks connect to your manufacturer account and pull odometer and battery readings straight from the car. Amperlo does not, and the two reasons are worth separating because they are independent of one another.
The first is the obvious one. Holding a live credential to somebody’s vehicle account is a meaningful thing to be responsible for, and declining to hold one at all keeps the authentication surface as small as it can be. Everything in Amperlo arrives by manual entry or by a receipt you sent, and there is no standing connection to anything that can open your car.
That instinct runs through the parts that do accept data from outside. Every account gets its own receipts address to forward invoices to, and only messages sent from your registered email address are accepted — so if the address itself leaks, which addresses do, nobody can push junk into your ledger with it. It is a letterbox that only takes post from one sender. The same design gives multi-vehicle owners a per-vehicle variant of the address, so a receipt lands against the right car regardless of which one happens to be active in the app.
The second reason is the one that changed the design. Telemetry does not contain the information the product is built on. A car knows roughly how much energy went into the battery. It does not know what you were charged for it, whether VAT was included, which tariff applied at that hour, or that an Electroverse discount took 51 per cent off the Be.EV headline rate. Amperlo pulls those details from receipts, matches known tariffs by parsed rate and time of day, attributes discounts to the loyalty programme responsible, and reports the effective pence per kWh you genuinely paid rather than the price on the pedestal.
A figure derived from the car would look more automatic and be worth considerably less. It could not produce a VAT reclaim export with the ex-VAT amount, the VAT and the inc-VAT amount kept separate, because the car never saw a VAT line. It would give you a tidy kWh total and leave every question you actually needed answering — what did that cost, what can I reclaim, did the subscription pay for itself — exactly where it found them.
What it does instead
The nos are only defensible if the yes is convenient, so logging a charge is deliberately quick and there are four ways to do it.
Quick Log is one tap from the bottom bar, pre-filled for the marina-overnight case — source already set to marina, date already set to yesterday — and built to work one-handed in the dark. You can upload a photo or PDF of the receipt straight from the charge network. You can forward the invoice from your email to your own receipts address. And on Android, or a PWA install, Amperlo registers as a share target so it appears in the operating system’s own Share sheet from any photo or PDF; on iOS a Shortcut you install once does the same thing from Mail, Files and Safari.
All four land in the same parsing pipeline, which reads the kWh, the cost, the VAT split, the network, the tariff, the discount and the reference number off the document. High-confidence rows confirm themselves; anything the parser is less sure about waits in a review queue for you rather than being posted quietly. That split is the point — you are not asked to check work the system is certain about, and the system does not pretend to certainty it lacks.
The subject line is part of the interface
The email route has a detail worth knowing, because it saves a second trip through the app. When you forward a receipt you can annotate the subject line, and Amperlo will pre-fill the resulting draft from it.
Put a pair like 22-80 in the subject and it is read as a state-of-charge start and end, with hyphens, en dashes or em dashes all recognised. Add a mileage reading — 45,123, or 45123mi, or 45123 miles — and the odometer for that day goes in too. So a subject reading Fwd: Your Be.EV receipt 22-80 45,123 arrives as a parsed receipt with the charge, the state of charge and the mileage already attached.
What is interesting is the restraint in the rules. A bare number on its own is not treated as mileage, because receipt references and order IDs would constantly false-positive. A space-separated pair like 22 80 counts only when it is the entire subject, so “Instavolt 45 kWh 22 charged” cannot be misread. State-of-charge pairs have to sit between 0 and 100 and go upwards, which is why 23-01 is treated as part of a date rather than a charge. Mileage that comes in lower than your last recorded reading is rejected outright; mileage more than 2,000 miles higher is accepted but flagged for you to look at.
None of that is glamorous, and all of it is the same instinct as the three refusals. A convenience that silently writes a wrong number into your history is not a convenience. It is a slow leak in the figure you were trying to establish.
Where the numbers come out
From there the parsed sessions feed cost-per-mile in three labelled modes: Energy for the electricity alone, Running to add servicing, tyres, MOT, insurance and VED, and TCO to add depreciation or lease payments. Naming the modes rather than publishing a single figure is deliberate — the electricity-only figure and the all-in figure for the very same car are far apart, and both get quoted as “what my EV costs to run”. The only useful version of the claim says which costs are inside it.
Discounts are handled the same way. When a receipt carries one, Amperlo attributes it to the loyalty programme responsible and reports the effective pence per kWh rather than the headline, which over a year adds up to an honest answer to whether that subscription paid for itself. Public and marina charges track the amount excluding VAT, the VAT and the amount including it as three separate columns, so the quarterly VAT-reclaim CSV can go to an accountant without being edited first.
And everything you put in comes back out. You can trigger a JSON export on demand from Settings, automated backups on the hosted service cover the preceding 90 days, and restore is symmetric — the export rehydrates into the same shape it left in. Receipt PDFs themselves sit on private storage and are served only to the account that owns them; parsing sends a document out once for extraction to a vendor named in our Privacy Policy, which does not train on it.
That is the whole trade. Three features we will not build, in exchange for a cost-per-mile figure you can put in front of somebody sceptical. If that sounds like the right trade, start with one vehicle free, check what the paid plan costs in pounds, dollars or euros on the pricing page, or read the full list of deliberate omissions on the FAQ.
