Who builds Portfolio On Fire

The short version

Portfolio On Fire is built and maintained by Dennis van Veen, an independent software developer. It is not a venture-funded startup, it is not a front end for a broker, and it is not owned by anyone who benefits from what you hold.

You can verify that last part without believing a word of this page: the App Store listing names the seller, and the app itself has no server to send your data to. How to check both is set out below.

What this app refuses to do

Most portfolio trackers begin by asking for an email address. That single step creates an account, an account creates a database row, and a database row creates something that can be breached, subpoenaed, sold in an acquisition, or quietly repurposed when the funding runs out.

Portfolio On Fire does not have that step, and consequently does not have the database. The design constraints are deliberate and they are not negotiable in future versions:

• No account. There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no identity attached to your holdings.
• No analytics SDK. Not a reduced one, not an anonymised one. None.
• No backend of ours. Your holdings are stored on your device. There is no server of mine that holds them, which means there is no server that could leak them.
• Export on every tier. Full JSON export, including on the free tier. There is no lock-in, because there is nothing for me to lock.

The app does fetch prices from public market data sources over HTTPS. Those requests carry ticker symbols and nothing that identifies you. Pro's cloud backup writes to your cloud account — iCloud or the Android equivalent — not to anything I operate.

How to verify this yourself

Privacy claims are worth exactly as much as your ability to check them. Four ways, from easiest to most thorough:

1. Check the App Store privacy label. Apple requires developers to declare data collection, and audits it. The listing for Portfolio On Fire is the independent record of what this app claims to collect.
2. Turn off the network. Put the device in flight mode and open the app. Everything except live prices keeps working, because everything except live prices is already on the device.
3. Watch the traffic. Any network inspector — Charles Proxy, mitmproxy, or Little Snitch on a desktop — will show you every request the app makes. You are looking for outbound requests carrying holdings. There are none.
4. Read this website's source. This site loads no analytics, no tag manager, no third-party fonts and no chat widget. View source on any page and count the third-party domains. It is zero. A privacy app whose marketing site tracks you is telling you something.

How it makes money

Portfolio On Fire is free for five holdings on your first list, with real-time prices, multi-currency support, dividend tracking and forecasting, the FIRE projection, dashboard customisation, distribution charts and JSON export all included at no cost. Extra lists are free to create — the free tier simply does not track them.

Pro costs €1.99 / $1.99 per month, or €19.99 / $19.99 a year — the annual plan works out at €1.67 a month and saves 16%. Both renew automatically and can be cancelled at any time from your device's subscription settings. It tracks everything you add rather than five holdings, and adds automatic cloud backup to your own cloud account.

That subscription is the entire business model. There are no ads, no affiliate links to brokers, no referral kickbacks, and no data sales. This matters more than it sounds: an app that earns from broker referrals has a reason to nudge you toward trading, and an app that earns from advertising has a reason to know more about you than it needs to. A subscription aligns the only incentive that should exist here — that the app is good enough that you keep paying for it.

What it is not

This is not investment advice. Portfolio On Fire is a tracking and planning tool. It does not broker trades, hold funds, or recommend what to buy or sell. Nobody involved in it is a licensed financial adviser, and nothing in the app should be read as a recommendation.

The FIRE projection is arithmetic performed on assumptions that you choose. It is not a forecast of what markets will do, and the honest answer is that nobody has one. The exact formula is documented here so you can see what it does and does not account for.

Prices come from public market data sources and can be delayed or occasionally wrong. Always check with your broker before acting on a number you see in any tracker, including this one.

Where it runs

iPhone and iPad, from iOS 15 onwards, available on the App Store today. An Android build is in closed testing — if you want in, the download page links to the tester group. When the Play listing goes live this page will say so.

The interface is available in nine languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Hindi. Numbers, dates and currency formatting follow your device locale rather than a single hard-coded convention, which sounds like a detail until you are a Dutch user looking at a figure like 1.674 and needing to know whether it means one thousand six hundred or one point six.

Getting in touch

Email support@portfolioonfire.com. Bug reports, feature requests, and corrections to anything on this site all go to the same place, and they reach a person rather than a ticketing queue.

If you have found something factually wrong on this website, that email is the fastest way to get it fixed. I would rather be corrected than be wrong in public.