Finding the subscriptions you forgot you're paying for

You started a free trial to watch one series. You paid for a fitness app in January, opened it twice, and moved on. You upgraded your cloud storage the week your phone was full. Each of those was a small, sensible decision, and any of them could still be billing you.

Why subscriptions are so easy to lose track of

A subscription is designed to be forgotten. It costs little enough that you don't notice it on a statement, it renews without asking, and the name on the charge often isn't the name of the product. Nothing in your week reminds you it exists.

A one-off purchase you remember because you chose it. A subscription you chose once, months ago, and it keeps choosing itself every month after that.

The four places subscriptions hide

1. 1

   Your phone's subscription list

   Anything bought through an app store lives here. On iPhone: Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. On Android: Google Play, tap your profile picture, then Payments and subscriptions. Look at the expired ones too. They're a record of what you tend to sign up for.

2. 2

   Three months of statements

   Open the last three months for every card and bank account you use. One month isn't enough: some services bill every quarter, and a yearly renewal can sit there for eleven months looking like nothing.

3. 3

   PayPal's automatic payments

   If you pay with PayPal, it keeps its own list of merchants allowed to charge you, separate from your card. In PayPal, look under Settings, Payments, then Automatic payments.

4. 4

   Your inbox

   Search for "receipt", "renewal", "your subscription", "trial ending" and "membership". This catches services billed to a card you rarely look at.

Decoding the charges you don't recognise

Some lines on a statement look like nothing you've ever bought. A few patterns help:

• "SQ *" followed by a name is usually a card payment taken through Square, often at a small business.
• "PAYPAL *" means the payment went through PayPal. The details are in your PayPal activity.
• "APPLE.COM/BILL" is an Apple purchase or subscription. It will be in the list from step 1.
• "GOOGLE *" followed by a name is a Google purchase: a Play Store app, or a Google service like YouTube or Google One. The name after the asterisk tells you which.
• Anything else: search the exact text on the statement. Someone has almost always asked about that same charge before.

If you still can't place it, call your bank. They can usually tell you who the merchant is, and if it isn't yours, they can dispute it.

Put everything in one list

For each subscription, write down:

• the name
• how much it costs
• how often it bills, monthly or yearly
• the next billing date
• the last time you actually used it

The last column does most of the work. It's hard to argue with "last opened in March".

Keep, cancel or downgrade

Go down the list and ask one question of each line: if I weren't already paying for this, would I sign up today?

• Yes: keep it.
• No: cancel it.
• Sort of: look for a cheaper plan. Many streaming services have a cheaper tier with ads, and many apps charge less for a year paid up front than for twelve monthly payments.

For streaming in particular, you rarely need every service at once. Keep one or two and rotate: cancel one when you've finished what you joined for, and pick up another next month.

Cancel it properly

You normally keep access until the end of the period you've already paid for, so there's no reason to wait for the last day before cancelling.

Stop it happening again

Finding them once is good. Not having to do it again is better.

• Set a reminder the moment you start a free trial, two days before it ends. Do it on the sign-up screen, while you still remember.
• Put subscriptions on one card, so they all show up on one statement.
• Check the list every three months. With the list from earlier, it takes five minutes.
• Track them where you track your spending. In Cashmonki you can add each subscription once as a recurring item, and it can remind you before the next charge, so the renewal arrives as a notice rather than a surprise. It sits alongside the rest of your spending in the charts, so you can see what subscriptions cost next to everything else.

If a subscription bills in another currency, a streaming service priced in dollars when you're paid in something else, the amount on your statement changes with the exchange rate. Multi-currency tracking records it in the currency it was charged in and converts it for your totals, so you see what it really costs you.

Where this method falls short

• It isn't automatic. Cashmonki doesn't connect to your bank, so it won't discover a subscription you never told it about. The four-place search above is how you find those. The app keeps track of them after that.
• Cancelling isn't always easy. Some services bury the option or ask you to call. The screenshot step matters most with these.
• Annual plans need the most attention. A yearly renewal is the one most likely to surprise you, because you've had a year to forget it. Give those the earliest reminder.

If you'd rather not use an app at all, the list from earlier works fine in a note or a spreadsheet. What matters is that it exists and you look at it. For more on that trade-off, see budget app versus spreadsheet.