ICS feed

What an ICS feed is

ICS is a standard calendar format that every calendar app can read. When a calendar is "published," it becomes a web address — a URL starting with https:// or webcal:// — that returns your events. Anyone who knows that URL can subscribe to it from another app.

Many calendars can produce such a feed: Apple's iCloud, most corporate calendars, Zimbra, Nextcloud, and plenty of industry tools that export your schedule. The name of the option varies — "publish," "share read-only," "export a subscription link" — but the result is the same: a URL to copy.

Adding a URL in Kilevo

In Kilevo, you open the calendar connection, choose "ICS feed," and paste the URL. That's it. No account to connect, no permission to grant: Kilevo simply reads the address you give it.

For each event in the feed, Kilevo reads three things: the title, the location, and the times. The title becomes the trip's purpose. The location is used to compute the distance from your default address, round trip by default. Attendees are never read or stored.

Read-only, always

An ICS feed can't be edited: it's read. Kilevo never writes anything to your calendar, never moves an event, never deletes one. You can remove the URL at any time and the subscription stops without leaving a trace in your calendar.

What creates no trip

An event with no location produces no trip. A video call — a Teams, Meet, or Zoom link — yields zero miles: Kilevo recognizes it and doesn't invent a distance. A blocked slot, a reminder, or an all-day event without an address stays out of your mileage log.

When the location is incomplete

A calendar rarely writes a full address. "10 Main Street," with no city, exists hundreds of times over. In that case Kilevo looks for the address closest to your home, marks the trip "guessed address," and shows the one it picked. One click on Confirm locks it in for every event with the same title, now and in the future. You can also set your own address: it survives later syncs.

How often

If you're a subscriber, Kilevo re-reads your feeds every night at 3:30 a.m. Yesterday's trips are there when you wake up. Everyone, including on the free plan, can trigger a read on demand from the app. There's no real-time sync: an ICS feed is refreshed by the provider on its own schedule, and Kilevo reads whatever the feed contains when it checks it.

One limit worth knowing

A published ICS URL is accessible to anyone who has the link: it isn't password-protected. That's a property of the feed itself, not of Kilevo. Publish only calendars whose content you're comfortable making readable, and don't share the URL.

The most common ICS feed is Apple's iCloud calendar. The Apple iCalendar page walks through sharing step by step. For how syncing works in general, see calendar sync. The security and privacy page covers what Kilevo keeps.

Already have a feed URL on hand? Create an account and paste it: your events become trips in minutes.