Find every subscription you are paying for

Why no app can show you everything

Bank-linked tools see transactions on the accounts you connect — nothing billed to another card, nothing inside an opaque platform charge, and an annual renewal only after it hits. The only complete inventory is the one you assemble once, from every source, and then maintain. Here is the order that catches the most with the least effort.

Source one: three months of statements

Pull ninety days of every card and account you actually use. Three months catches monthlies three times (pattern confirmation) and most quarterlies once. Mark every recurring-looking entry — including the small ones, which are the ones that survive for years precisely because they are small.

Source two: the platform subscription screens

Apple and Google each keep their own subscription ledger, and charges billed through them appear on statements as generic platform entries — the statement line will not tell you which app. Open the subscription section of your Apple account and of Google Play; our platform-billing guide explains why this split exists and how cancellation works there.

Source three: the inbox

Search your email — every address you use — for: “receipt”, “invoice”, “renewal”, “your subscription”, “payment confirmation”, “trial”. Sort by sender and skim the last twelve months. This is the source that surfaces the annual charges no ninety-day statement window can show — the domain renewal, the software licence, the cloud plan paid last November.

Source four: the wallets

PayPal keeps its own automatic-payments list; check it. Then any place a card is saved and can be charged without you: the browser’s saved payment methods, a games platform, an online marketplace with a subscribe-and-save programme.

Source five: the memory-joggers

Walk the devices (smart TV apps, the tablet the kids use, the router with a security add-on), ask the household (what runs on the shared card — our duplicate-finder guide turns this into its own exercise), and think through the calendar: what did you sign up for last January that renews next January?

Recording is the audit

Each find gets four notes: name, amount, billing interval, next payment date — plus the cancellation notice period if the contract has one. For the ongoing discipline — running this as a yearly routine with decision rules — the audit guide picks up where this discovery pass ends. That last field is what converts the list from trivia into protection, because in much of the US no law reminds you before a renewal; the record you keep is the reminder system. A tracker built for exactly these fields turns the one-hour audit into a permanent, warning-capable inventory — and the audit never needs repeating.

This page gives general information, not legal advice. Statutes are summarised; the wording that binds is the current text of the law itself. For a contested case, a consumer-protection office or a licensed attorney in your state is the right address.