How to find every subscription you are paying for
Subscriptions are built to be forgotten: a small amount, taken automatically, on a card you rarely look at closely. The reliable way to find them all is not to remember them but to read them off your statements — here is how, and what to do with what you find.
Why they are easy to lose
- Small monthly amounts add up quietly. A $12.99 monthly charge is $155.88 a year; five of those is nearly $780.
- Yearly renewals come round once, often a year after you last thought about them.
- Free trials turn into full payments unless you cancel in time.
- Price rises are usually announced by email and then simply charged. A rise from $9.99 to $10.99 a month is $12 more a year.
- They are spread out: some on a credit card, some on a debit card, some through PayPal, Apple or Google.
Step 1: download your statements as files
Sign in to your bank and each card company on their websites and look for Download transactions, Export or Statements. Choose CSV, or OFX / QFX (the Quicken formats), and the longest date range available — ideally twelve months, so that yearly renewals appear. Do this for every account that pays for things, including cards you rarely use.
If your bank only gives PDF statements, PDF Table to CSV turns the transaction table into a CSV file you can use.
Step 2: find what repeats
A subscription is a charge from the same merchant at a steady rhythm — the same day each month, or each year. The Subscription Finder does this for you in your browser: it groups charges by merchant, ignoring the reference numbers and dates banks add to descriptions, and tests each group for a weekly, monthly, quarterly, six-monthly or yearly pattern. It points out price rises, trials that became payments, possible double charges, and subscriptions that seem to have stopped.
Doing it by hand works too: sort the statement by description, and look for names that appear month after month.
Reading the names on a statement
- “PAYPAL *NAME” or “SQ *NAME”: the name after the asterisk is the business; PayPal or Square just took the payment.
- “APPLE.COM/BILL” or “GOOGLE *…”: subscriptions you started on a phone. Check the full list in your phone's settings — iPhone: your name, then Subscriptions; Android: Google Play, then Payments & subscriptions.
- A name you do not recognise: businesses often bill under a parent company's name. Search the exact text, and if you still cannot place it, ask your card issuer.
Step 3: decide what stays
For each one, ask whether you used it in the last month, and whether you would sign up again today at this price. Then:
- Cancel in the company's app or account settings, or in your phone's subscription settings if you subscribed there. Cancel before the next charge date and keep the confirmation.
- Downgrade to a cheaper plan, or switch to yearly billing for the ones you keep, if yearly is cheaper.
- Share a family plan you already pay for instead of paying twice.
- Double charges: ask the merchant for a refund; if that does not work, your card issuer can dispute the charge.
- Charges that continue after you cancelled: contact the merchant with your confirmation, then your card issuer or bank, who can dispute the charge and block further payments to that merchant.
Step 4: keep them in view
Put the ones you keep into a list with their amounts and renewal dates, so a price rise or a renewal does not surprise you. The Subscription Finder can add everything it found to the Expense Tracker in one step, as recurring bills. Repeat the check every few months — a quick look at new names on a statement is enough.