How to keep track of subscriptions: the yearly blind spot
You know what Netflix costs. The charge that catches you is the one you set up last March, for a year, at a price nobody in the house now remembers.
13 September 2026
You know what Netflix costs you. The charge that will catch you is the one you set up last March, for a year, at a price nobody in the house now remembers.
Search for how to keep track of subscriptions and every answer is the same shape. Get an app, link your bank, let it find them. It works, and it finds a lot.
It finds them by reading charges that have already left your account.
For the monthly ones that is fine. For the yearly ones it means the app introduces you to a subscription on the day it takes ninety-six dollars off you, eleven months after the last moment anybody could have done something about it.
Every tracker is looking backwards
A bank-linked tracker works from your transaction feed. A charge is evidence. No charge is no evidence, and there is nothing clever it can do about that.
So the quality of what it tells you depends entirely on how often the thing bills.
A monthly subscription is visible within weeks and stays visible, which is why every tracker demo looks so good. Twelve sightings a year, and the moment you decide to cancel is any moment you like.
A yearly plan gives a tracker two data points in two years, and both of them arrive after the money has gone.
The free trial is the sharpest version. You sign up, nothing is charged, and for thirty days there is no transaction for anything to read. The first charge is also the moment the trial stopped being free, so the first sighting and the closing of the window are the same event.
How to keep track of subscriptions: build the list once, by hand
C+R Research asked a thousand US consumers to guess what they spent a month on subscriptions and then to itemise it. The guesses averaged eighty-six dollars. The itemised totals averaged two hundred and nineteen. That survey ran from 22 April to 2 May 2022 and the figures are on C+R’s own site, checked on 13 September 2026.
The gap is not carelessness. It is what you get when the only record of a charge is the charge.
So the list is worth twenty minutes of manual work exactly once. After that it maintains itself, whichever tool you keep it in.
- Open twelve months, not one. Card statements and the current account. Read the merchant names rather than the amounts, because scanning for amounts makes you stop at the big ones and scanning for names makes you stop at the unfamiliar ones.
- Write down anything that appears once or twice. Those are the yearly ones. They are the entire reason for doing this and they are invisible in any single month.
- Check both app stores separately. Anything bought inside an app is billed by the store, so it can land on your statement under the store’s name rather than the product’s.
- Do it for every adult in the house. Two people, two Apple Accounts, two sets of charges, one household.
That is the same opening move that makes a bill list useful, and for the same reason. How to keep track of bills goes through what a single month of statements can and cannot show you.
Then stop rebuilding it. In Chirpy each subscription goes into Money once, in the Repeats panel: the name, the amount, every month or every year, and the date of the next one. It posts itself from then on, so a year of spending builds without anybody maintaining a spreadsheet, and the next one due shows up on the household’s Today screen before it lands rather than after. If your bank exports a CSV, Money will import twelve months of it in one go and you tick off the repeats you find. Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, and it does not ask for a card.
The line on your statement is not the product name
This is where the twenty-minute read goes wrong for most people. You scan for “Spotify” and find something that looks like a reference number with a shop’s name buried in it.
Payment processors and app stores put their own descriptor on the charge. One store can therefore account for five different subscriptions on one line each month, or for one line with a total that matches nothing you recognise.
The stores are the only places that itemise their own billing, so go to them directly.
On an iPhone
Open the Settings app, tap your name at the top, then tap Subscriptions. Every subscription billed through your Apple Account is listed there with its renewal date, and cancelling is on the same screen. Steps checked on support.apple.com on 13 September 2026.
On Android
Open the Google Play app, go to the subscriptions screen, and pick the one you want. Google’s own help page adds the detail people get caught by: deleting the app does not cancel the subscription. Checked on support.google.com on 13 September 2026.
The date worth tracking is the cancel-by date
Almost every subscription tracker records when the money leaves. That is the wrong date for the only decision you ever make about a subscription.
By the time the charge lands, the year is bought. What you needed was a prompt several weeks earlier, while the question “do we still use this” could still change the answer.
| Kind | What to write down | When you want telling |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly streaming | Price, and which adult’s account it is on | Quarterly, as a batch |
| Yearly software | Renewal date and last year’s price | Four weeks out, while switching is still easy |
| Free trial | The day it converts, and what it converts to | Three days before it ends |
| Gym or club | Notice period, which is often a month | Before the notice period starts, not after |
| Insurance-style renewals | Anniversary date and current premium | Four weeks out, with a quote in hand |
Chirpy puts the same reminder ladder on everything with a date on it: thirty days out, a week out, the previous evening at eight, and two hours before. For a renewal, that first rung is the one doing the work. Say “Adobe renews 14 March” into the household calendar and the thirty-day warning is already set, for both of you, without anybody opening a settings screen.
Typing it that way is the reason it gets recorded at all. Adding tasks by typing naturally covers what a line like that resolves and where it gives up.
Nobody owes you a one-click cancellation
People plan their cancellations for the morning of the renewal. It is a reasonable plan and it assumes something that is not currently true.
The FTC’s click-to-cancel rule, which would have required cancelling to be about as easy as signing up, was vacated by the Eighth Circuit on 8 July 2025, six days before it was due to take effect. The FTC went back to the start: on 13 March 2026 it issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, which is the stage before a proposal, let alone a rule. Both checked on ftc.gov on 13 September 2026.
So the speed of a cancellation is whatever the company decides, subject to state law. Some take two taps. Some want a phone call in business hours, and some route you through a retention offer first.
One thing a bank-linked tracker does that we do not: Rocket Money detects subscriptions automatically from your linked accounts, and Premium members can ask it to cancel one on their behalf rather than doing it themselves, per its own help centre, checked 13 September 2026. Chirpy will not ring anybody up for you. What Chirpy does instead is put the renewal in front of both adults four weeks early, sitting next to the calendar, the bills and the shopping list where household decisions actually get made, and it does it without your bank login.
Two adults, two app stores, one household bill
Ask a couple who pays for the music subscription. There is often a pause, and sometimes there are two.
Duplicate subscriptions are common for a dull reason. Each person sets things up on their own phone, each charge lands on their own card, and neither statement is ever read by the other person. Nothing is hidden. Nobody has ever looked at both.
Putting the repeats in a shared place fixes it in one pass. In Chirpy’s Money the repeats belong to the household rather than to a person, so both of you see the same list of what leaves every month and every year, and the duplicate shows itself the first time you read it together.
The reason a subscription survives is usually that nobody remembers what it was for. Keep a line in Chirpy’s Notes beside the list, one sentence per service saying why the house has it. That settles more arguments than the price ever does.
It is the same failure that kills a joint budget in its second month. Our guide to the household budget couples can actually keep is about what happens when one person holds the whole picture.
Ten minutes, four times a year
Monthly subscription audits are a fantasy. Nobody does them twice.
Four times a year is enough, because subscriptions move slowly. Put it on the calendar as a repeat so it arrives rather than being remembered.
- Read the repeats list, top to bottom. You are looking for three things: a price that went up, something nobody has opened since the last read, and two services doing the same job.
- Check the next four renewal dates. Anything inside the next quarter gets its thirty-day warning confirmed now.
- Cancel one thing. Not as a rule, as a habit. The read is worth more when it ends in a decision.
Photographing the charge confirmation is the quickest way to get an unfamiliar one recorded properly: Money reads the merchant, the amount and the date off the picture and hands you a draft to confirm. The app that scans receipts covers what happens after the scan, which is the part that decides whether any of it was worth doing.