How to find every subscription you're paying for (in 15 minutes)

Most people have about twelve active subscriptions and can name seven of them. That gap, the five you forgot, is where the money goes. A proper audit takes fifteen minutes and usually finds two or three things worth cancelling on the spot.

Here's the script we use. It works on iOS, Android, and anything with a bank statement.

Step 1: Pull 90 days of bank statements

Log in to your bank. Export or scroll through the last three months. You're looking for any recurring charge: same merchant, same amount, roughly the same day of the month. Write each one down. Don't skip the small ones. A forgotten $4.99 a month is $60 a year you're giving away for nothing.

Look especially at charges with cryptic descriptors: APPLE.COM/BILL, GOOGLE *, PATREON*, STRIPE *. These are umbrella merchants that hide the real service. Click into each one to figure out what it actually is.

Step 2: Search your email

Open your email. Search these strings, one at a time:

• your receipt
• invoice
• renewal
• subscription
• billing

You'll find subscriptions your bank statement doesn't show clearly, because the merchant descriptor is a generic payment processor. Cross reference against your list from Step 1 and add anything new.

Step 3: Check your phone's subscription list

Most people miss this one.

• iOS: Settings → your name → Subscriptions. This shows everything you signed up for through the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, TestFlight trials that never lapsed.
• Android: Google Play → menu → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions.

Expect to find one or two you'd genuinely forgotten. The App Store is a common home for trial-turned-paid subscriptions you never opened again.

Step 4: Check browser-saved payment methods

Chrome and Safari both remember which websites you've saved cards to. Go to your browser's autofill settings and look at the list. If there's a name you don't recognise, or one you recognise but haven't used in six months, that's a subscription candidate worth investigating.

Step 5: Sort everything into three buckets

Now you have a list. For each subscription, answer one question: when did you last use this?

• Last 30 days → keep. This is working.
• Last 30 to 90 days → question. Is it worth the cost? Could you pause it? Use it for a month and decide.
• Over 90 days → cancel. If you haven't used it in a quarter, you don't need it.

Step 6: Cancel the ones you don't need

For most services, cancellation is one click from their settings page. A few require calling or going through a retention flow. The companies that do this are telling you something about how much they respect their customers. Our cancellation playbook covers the trickiest ones (Adobe, gyms, Amazon Prime, dating apps).

Step 7: Track the survivors

You just did the hard work. Don't lose it. Put the remaining subscriptions somewhere you'll see them, so in three months you aren't starting this audit from zero again.

We built SubWiz for this. You add each subscription once, pick your home currency, and see when the next renewal is. It handles weekly, monthly, yearly, and weird custom cadences. If you track subscriptions in multiple currencies (22 of them), it converts them all into one total.

The math

The average person wastes around $273 a year on subscriptions they don't use. A fifteen-minute audit every three months would cancel most of that. That's one of the best hourly rates you'll ever earn for paperwork.