ZeroBasis: A Private 0% Balance Transfer Tracker That Never Touches Your Bank
The 0% balance transfer is a real escape hatch from credit card interest. It's also a trap with a deadline. Miss a single expiry date and the rate snaps back to 29% APR — sometimes higher — on the full remaining balance. Hundreds of pounds vanish overnight because a calendar reminder didn't fire.
The standard advice is to track it in a budgeting app. The standard budgeting app wants your bank login through Open Banking before it'll do anything.
That's the trade most people don't want to make: hand over read access to every account you own, so a piece of software can remind you about four dates.
ZeroBasis is built for the people who refused.
What ZeroBasis does
ZeroBasis is a private, manual tracker for 0% credit card balance transfers, money transfers, and 0% purchase offers. You type in your card limits and transfer details. ZeroBasis tracks the expiry dates, calculates how much interest-free credit you still have to spend safely, and warns you before any promotional period ends.
No bank login. No Open Banking. No data sold to anyone. It runs as a Progressive Web App that stores your data the way you tell it to — and nothing more.
"I built ZeroBasis to solve my own problem. I was managing my debt ladder in a messy Excel sheet, but I absolutely refused to hand over my bank logins to an aggregator app just to track my own credit cards. Privacy shouldn't be the price of financial clarity." — Alan, founder
What's broken about the alternative
The budgeting-app category has converged on one model: connect your bank, scrape your transactions, build the dashboard from there. It's clean for the app and invasive for the user. To track four credit cards, you're asked to give up read access to your current account, savings, ISA, mortgage, and anything else the aggregator can see.
For most people that's not a fair exchange. For anyone juggling 0% deals deliberately — moving balances, building a buffer, avoiding the cliff — it's an absurd one.
The other option is a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets work until they don't. The formula for "how much can I still safely spend on Card B without losing the 0% on Card A" is doable but easy to break. And spreadsheets don't warn you.
ZeroBasis sits in the gap. Manual input, automatic math, automatic warnings.
How it works
100% manual input — No bank connections, no Open Banking, no aggregator. You enter card limits, balances, and transfer details. Your data stays yours.
Visual expiry timeline — Every 0% promotional period laid out on one timeline so the next cliff is impossible to miss. Advance warnings fire well before the rate snaps back.
Spending Surplus engine — Calculates exactly how much interest-free credit you can still use as an emergency buffer without breaking your 0% terms. Not a rough estimate — a number you can spend against.
Multi-card management — Balance transfers, money transfers, and 0% purchase offers all tracked in the same dashboard. No more flipping between four card apps to figure out where you stand.
Who this is for
Anyone running 0% balance transfers to climb out of credit card debt — and who has noticed that the apps offering to "help" are also asking for the keys to every account they own. Privacy-conscious budgeters. People who maintain a deliberate debt ladder and don't want to manage it in Excel anymore.
Free for casual tracking up to 2 credit cards. A Premium tier covers power users with longer ladders, and there's a one-time Lifetime Founder's Pass for anyone who refuses monthly subscriptions on principle.
Try it
Open ZeroBasis — or see the ZeroBasis listing on ShipBoost for category context.
