SalarySeed
An iOS app that tells you what a salary in Portugal actually means. What lands in your account, what it costs your employer, where it sits against everyone else, what it might be in twenty years, and whether your payslip adds up.
Everything below is the real app, recorded in the iOS Simulator. The clips have the waiting cut out of them, because the pauses were mine and not the app's; nothing else is edited, and every screen runs at the speed it actually runs at. The app is bilingual and auto-detects; these are in English. Every figure comes from a published table, and nothing typed into the app ever leaves the phone.
The salary
One number in, and the app works out the rest: net, the full cost to the employer, where that sits nationally, what it looks like across the EU, and what twenty years of staying put is worth against moving. Each of those is a row on Home, and Home is the only way around the app.
What to watch for
- Home holds one figure, and the three labels under it are three ways to read the same year: a month over twelve, a month over the fourteen real payments, or the year itself. 2 400 € gross is 1 700 € net, or 23 794 € a year.
- Tax is one waterfall, from the 2 970 € the employer actually pays down to the 1 700 € that reaches you, with every deduction as a rate on gross. 57% of what the employer spends reaches the pocket, and the annual settlement writes out every assumption it made, including the ones that might not apply.
- The distribution is scrubbable. Drag the handle and the headline rewrites itself for that salary, then let go and it returns to you. Under it, people like you is one list, and each line opens to its own median.
- Açores and Madeira are drawn with no colour and labelled "no figure", because the survey behind the map covers the mainland only. The app says so rather than inventing a shade. Tap a district and it is measured against where you live: Lisboa pays this sector 4% more than Porto.
- Germany pays 127% more in this activity, and the app applies that ratio to your own salary instead of putting a foreign average beside a Portuguese one. The second toggle redraws all 27 in purchasing power instead of euros.
- The projection is a staircase, not a curve, because the source publishes six tenure bands and not a smooth function.
- Set the negotiated raise to zero and the app says changing jobs every four years costs you 0.8 points a year. Raise it and the verdict flips, and the card at the bottom adds up what that is worth over twenty years.
The payslip
You hand it a PDF, photograph it, or pick a photo, and it tells you whether the arithmetic holds. It runs entirely on the phone, nothing is uploaded, and nothing about the payslip is ever written to the phone. There is no history. One figure can outlive the reading, and only because you tapped to keep it.
What to watch for
- It is the "Check payslip" row on Home, and "Update my salary" opens the same reader for anyone who came for the number rather than the verdict.
- Three ways in, and only one of them needs anything from you. The file and photo pickers run in Apple's own interface and hand over a single item. The camera is the one permission the app asks for, and the screen explains why before you tap it.
- It asks you to confirm what it read before it will judge anything, because this one came from a photograph and recognition can misread a digit.
- Four checks pass. The lines add up to the total, gross minus deductions is exactly the net, Social Security is 11% of the base, and the pay clears the minimum wage.
- Six checks refuse to run, and say so by name, with the reason: it could not find one of the figures they need. A check that quietly did not happen reads as a check that passed, so this app will not do that.
- It names the tables it used: the 2026 rules for mainland Portugal, on a fourteen month year.
- The ask comes last, after the verdict. Only then does it offer to keep the gross it read as your salary, next to the gross you have now, so you are deciding that knowing what it just found. That one number is the only thing that can outlive the reading.
Screens
