Here is an uncomfortable fact about almost every app you pay for: you use a fraction of it. Not because the rest is bad, but because you never found it. You downloaded the thing to solve one problem, solved it in the first ten minutes, and never went looking again. Meanwhile the feature that would have saved you an hour a month sits two taps away in a settings screen you've opened twice.
Pocket Clear has this problem too. Over the past year it grew savings goals, tags, budget rollover, inter-account transfers, travel mode, a second currency, CSV import, partner mode. Our support inbox kept proving the point: people asking for features that already shipped. One user asked whether we could add a way to split a restaurant bill across categories. We'd had it for eight months.
The usual fix is an onboarding carousel — five screens of feature announcements you swipe past to get to the app. We've all learned to dismiss those. So we built the opposite: something that sits quietly on the Home screen and is there when you're curious, not when we're eager.
A ring in the corner
In the top-left of Home there's now a small progress ring showing a number like 6/19. That's how many of Pocket Clear's features you've set up. Tap it and the Set up Pocket Clear checklist opens: nineteen rows, each a feature with a one-line description of what it actually does. Tap a row and you land on the screen where you set it up.
That's the whole feature. Its virtue isn't cleverness — it's that the list is finite and visible. You can see the shape of the app in one screen, which is something a settings menu has never managed.
- It already knows what you use. An item counts as done because your data says so — you have a budget, you turned on Cloud Sync, you've linked a partner. Nobody has to tick anything. Long-time users open it to a ring that's already part-full.
- Skipping counts. Never going to link a partner? Hit Skip. The row greys out, the ring advances, and an Undo button stays if you change your mind. Progress shouldn't require wanting every feature.
- It knows when to leave. At 19/19 the ring disappears from Home entirely. You can reopen the list from Settings → Setup guide whenever you like.
- It gates nothing. The free plan works identically whether the ring reads 0/19 or 19/19. This is a map, not a paywall with extra steps.
Why a checklist and not a tour
There's a well-worn bit of psychology here — the Zeigarnik effect, the finding that people remember and feel pulled toward unfinished tasks more than finished ones. A partially filled ring is mildly, productively annoying in a way a feature announcement never is. But the reason it works isn't really the psychology. It's that you opened it. A tour interrupts you to talk about itself; a checklist waits until you're curious and then answers quickly.
That's also why every row leads somewhere. A checklist that describes features without taking you to them is just a brochure with checkboxes. Tap "Create a savings goal" and you're on the savings goal screen, not on a page about savings goals.
What's actually on the list
Eight free items and eleven Pro ones, split under Free and Pro headings so it's obvious which is which:
Free: add your first transaction · create a custom category · add a subcategory · add a payment type · split a transaction · turn on a daily reminder · import transactions · add the home-screen widget
Pro: set up a budget · turn on Cloud Sync · link a partner · turn on Tags · set a secondary currency · log a transfer · export your data · try Travel Mode · set up a recurring transaction · create a savings goal · turn on balance carry-over
Reading that list is, for a lot of people, the first time they'll learn half of it exists. If you're on the free plan, Pro rows carry a PRO badge and tapping one shows the upgrade screen — we'd rather be upfront about which is which than let you tap into a dead end.
It stays on your device
Worth saying plainly, because it's the reason we could ship this the way we did: none of it is tracked. There's no analytics event when you open the checklist, no record anywhere of which features you use, nothing sent to a server. Which items you skipped live on your phone. Done-state is computed on the fly from data already sitting in your local database — which is also why, if you use Cloud Sync, a feature you set up on your phone already reads as done on your tablet.
A "feature adoption" system that phoned home would be trivially easier to build. It also wouldn't belong in a privacy-first app.
One item that works differently
Neither iOS nor Android will reliably tell an app whether its widget is on your home screen. So Add the home-screen widget is marked done the first time Pocket Clear notices one of its own widgets rendering. Once marked, it stays marked — take the widget off later and the item doesn't un-tick. Slightly imprecise, and the honest trade for not being able to ask the question directly.
The list will get longer
Every new Pocket Clear feature adds a row, so the total grows — a ring you'd completed can come back after an update with one new thing on it. That's the intent. The checklist is meant to be how you find out what's new, so the next feature doesn't spend eight months being a feature request from people who already have it.
Full details, including the complete item list, are in the help center: Setup Guide.
See what your expense tracker can actually do
Pocket Clear is a private, offline-first expense tracker — no bank linking, no ads, no tracking. Free forever, with Pro from $4.99/month.