How to track subscriptions, free trials and renewal dates
Twenty minutes of looking, one page of writing, and a calculator that turns every billing cycle into the same number so you can finally compare them. No signup, no bank access, nothing leaves this page.
Nobody decided to spend this much. It accumulated, one reasonable yes at a time.
Every single one was affordable on the day you agreed to it. That is exactly the mechanism.
Subscriptions get away from people for four boring structural reasons: they renew without asking, some of them are annual so you meet them once a year, they arrive through app stores and second accounts you rarely check, and the price you agreed to is often not the price you now pay. None of that is a memory problem, so trying harder to remember will not fix it. What fixes it is twenty minutes with your bank statements and one page you keep. The calculator below converts weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly into one comparable number, shows what renews next, and marks free trials at the price they are about to become. It runs entirely in this page: no account, no bank connection, nothing sent anywhere.
The subscription counter
Runs in your browserWhy subscriptions get lost, structurally
It is worth being precise about the mechanism, because the usual advice is to be more disciplined and that advice does nothing.
A subscription is the only purchase that happens by default. Doing nothing is the same as saying yes, every month, forever.
You meet an annual charge once a year, eleven months after the last time you thought about it. Nobody has a memory system that works on that cycle.
App stores, a second card, a shared family account, a work address. Each of those is a place your statements do not obviously show.
You agreed to one number, and there have been two rises since. Nobody re-decides, because the email arrived on a Tuesday and looked like admin.
You forget subscriptions because the system hides them. Better memory will not solve that, which is why the fix is a list rather than an intention.
The share of people who underestimated what they spend on subscriptions when asked to guess first and then add it up. Two thirds of them were out by more than 200 dollars a month.
Source: West Monroe, the state of subscription services spending and their press release. A consultancy's survey of American consumers, so read it as a strong indication about a population rather than a prediction about you. That gap between guess and reality is a whole article of its own, which is the next page along.
Finding all of them in about twenty minutes
Set a timer, because this expands to fill whatever time you give it. Four places, in this order.
- Three months of bank and card statements. Three, not one, because that is the only way quarterly charges show up. Search for the same amount appearing twice. Do this for every card, including the one you barely use.
- Your phone's subscription screen. Both app stores keep their own list in settings, and it is the single most surprising screen in this exercise. People routinely find two or three they had entirely forgotten.
- Recurring payments in PayPal or any wallet. These are invisible on a bank statement because the line just says the wallet's name.
- Your inbox, searched for the words. Receipt, renewal, your subscription, welcome to. This catches the annual ones that have not come round yet, which are the ones the statements cannot show you.
Twenty minutes is enough to get most of them and it is not enough to get all of them. That is fine. A list with eleven of your thirteen subscriptions on it is transformative compared with no list, and the last two will turn up on a statement eventually.
What to write down for each one
Five things. Any fewer and you will have to go looking again, which is the thing you are trying to stop doing.
- What it is and what it costs. The current price, not the one you signed up at.
- The cycle. Weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. This is the field that makes everything comparable, and it is the one people leave out.
- The next date it takes money. Approximate is fine. A month is enough to be useful.
- Where to cancel it. The app store, the website, an email to somebody. Write this down at the moment you sign up, because future you will be looking for it in a hurry and annoyed.
- Which card it is on. Ten seconds now, and it saves the whole exercise when a card gets replaced.
- When you last used it. One extra column that decides more cancellations than the price does. A thing you last opened in February is a different proposition from the same price you used yesterday.
If you would rather do this on paper or in a spreadsheet than in the tool above, this is the whole thing. Copy the header line and go.
SERVICE PRICE CYCLE NEXT DATE CANCEL WHERE CARD LAST USED Storage plan £2.49 month 3rd phone settings Visa yesterday Streaming £10.99 month 18th website Visa last week Photo app £34.99 year 14 Mar app store Amex February Password mgr £29.99 year 2 Sep website Visa daily Meal kit £38.00 week Thursday website, 5 days Visa paused
The statement lines that stop people. Charges rarely carry the name of the thing. A photo app might appear as its parent company, an app store charge often shows as the store rather than the app, and a European service can arrive with a different legal name and a country code. If a line is unidentifiable, search the exact amount plus the word subscription, and check the app store list before assuming it is fraud.
Free trials: write them down at the price they will become
A free trial costs nothing today and something specific on a known date. That is not a subscription yet, and it is not nothing either, and most people record it as nothing.
So write it into the list immediately, at the full price it becomes, with the date it becomes it. The trial appears in your monthly total as a real number, which is a slightly annoying and completely accurate way to see it. If that number bothers you, that is information: you have just learned something about whether you want the thing.
Two habits that do most of the work here. Set the reminder for two days before the trial ends, not the day it ends, because cancelling often needs a working day. And decide the cancellation route on the day you sign up, while you can still see the page you signed up on.
When you sign up for anything with a trial, write the end date down before you close the tab. Not in your head. That thirty seconds is the entire difference between a trial you chose to keep and one that just happened to you.
The monthly equivalent column, and why it matters
Prices are quoted in whatever cycle suits the seller: monthly, annual with a discount, or every three months for no obvious reason. You cannot compare those or add them up, so most people never do either.
Converting everything to a monthly number is the single most useful move in the whole exercise. Annual divided by twelve, quarterly divided by three, weekly multiplied by roughly 4.33. Now a 120-dollar annual thing and a 12-dollar monthly thing are visibly not the same size, which is invisible when they are written the way you bought them.
The yearly total is the other number worth having, because it is the one that produces a reaction. Nobody cancels anything over 14 dollars a month. People do reconsider 168 dollars a year, and it is the same fact.
A widely reported figure puts average American subscription spending at about 111 dollars a month, via WFSB, citing CNET. It reaches us through news coverage rather than the study, and a national average tells you nothing about whether your own number is reasonable.
How to cancel one without losing anything
The guide so far finds them and prices them. Cancelling safely is its own short procedure, and skipping it is how people lose photos, or pay twice, or discover in March that they cancelled the thing their mother was using.
- Check what it holds. Photos, documents, playlists, a domain, years of notes. Export before you cancel, not after, because access often ends the moment you press the button rather than at the end of the period you paid for.
- Check who else is on it. Family plans and shared logins. One cancellation can quietly remove three other people, and they will find out at the worst moment.
- Check what you have already paid for. If it is annual and you are two months in, you may be able to keep using it until the renewal date. Cancelling the renewal is usually the right move rather than cancelling access today.
- Look for a refund window or a notice period. Some services refund a recent charge if you ask within a few days. Gyms, insurance and anything with a contract may need notice in writing, and the notice period is the reason to start early rather than on the renewal date.
- Cancel, then get it in writing. Keep the confirmation email, or screenshot the screen that says cancelled. This is the only proof you have if the next charge arrives anyway.
- Diary the next billing date anyway. One line in the calendar. If a charge appears after you cancelled, you have the date, the amount and the confirmation, which turns a dispute into a two-minute message.
One thing not to do: cancelling by blocking the card. It stops the payment and it does not end the contract, so the debt can keep accruing and the account can go to collections. Cancel with the service, then let the card change be a backstop.
The quarterly ritual, and the usual objections
Four times a year, fifteen minutes, three questions per line: did I use it, is the price still what it says, and would I sign up for this today. Anything that fails the third question is the one to look at, and the honest answer is that most things pass and one or two do not. That is a good result.
"Should I not just use an app that connects to my bank?"
Some of those are good and they will find things you missed. A bank-connected tracker can save you real time, and in exchange it usually needs ongoing read access to your transaction history. What exactly it can see, how long it keeps it and how you revoke it differ from service to service, so check the permissions screen and the privacy policy before connecting, and remember that access can normally be withdrawn from your bank’s own settings. Worth doing deliberately rather than by default.
"There are trackers and spreadsheet templates already"
There are, and several are fine. TrackAllSubs and The Sub Tracker are dedicated services, and spreadsheet templates do the arithmetic without any signup at all. The gap they leave is that one asks you to adopt a new service and the other asks you to open a spreadsheet, and the calculator above is on the page you are already reading.
"What about the ones I share with family, or with work?"
Put in the share you actually pay and write down who else is on it. The awkward part of a shared subscription is never the money, it is that nobody remembers whose card it is on until that card expires, and cancelling one quietly takes it away from three other people. Work subscriptions belong on a separate list entirely: the ones on your personal card that you have been meaning to expense are the ones that survive a job change and keep charging you.
"What counts as a subscription, exactly?"
Anything that takes money again without asking. That includes several things that never call themselves subscriptions: the annual fee on a credit card, a bank account with a monthly charge, breakdown cover, a professional membership, a gym contract with a notice period, cloud storage bundled with a phone plan. If it renews on its own, it goes on the list.
Where we come into it
Renewal dates are a good example of the thing this whole blog is about: information that is easy to write down once and impossible to hold in your head for eleven months.
In dEssence you can save a subscription with its price, its date and the note about where to cancel, and then ask Tracy in ordinary words, along the lines of what renews next month. Two limits, stated plainly. It does not connect to your bank and it never will, so it only knows what you tell it. And it does not chase payments or cancel anything for you: it is a place to keep the facts, not an agent acting on your account.
You cannot remember eleven renewal dates. Nobody can. Write them down.
Convert everything to a monthly number, look at the yearly total once, and check it four times a year.
How the calculator works
Plain arithmetic, nothing clever. Weekly is multiplied by 4.33, monthly is left alone, quarterly is divided by 3, yearly is divided by 12. The annual figure is the monthly total times twelve. There is no rounding cleverness and no assumptions about you.
The next renewal list shows anything you gave a date to, in date order, and flags what falls in the next thirty days. Lines without a date still count towards the totals, they just cannot appear in that list.
Free trials are marked and counted at the price you type, because that is what they will cost. The total tells you what you are about to be committed to, not what left your account this month, and the tool says which of the two it is showing.
Currency. The dollar sign is cosmetic. Type numbers in whatever currency you use and every figure means the same thing, since nothing here is converted.
Nothing leaves this page. No account, no login, no bank connection, no storage. We never see your numbers. Closing the tab throws it all away, which does mean you should copy the total somewhere before you go.
Figures quoted above: the 89% and the two-thirds are from West Monroe. The 111 dollar average comes via news reporting of a CNET study rather than from the study directly.