Most subscription tracking fails in week three. Not because the tool is wrong, but because the initial list was incomplete and the reminders were set to dates that do not matter. This is the setup that survives.
Step one: find everything, from five sources
A bank statement alone finds less than half. That is structural, not carelessness — Apple, Google and PayPal bundle several subscriptions into one line with no breakdown, so those subscriptions are not overlooked, they are invisible.
1. Bank statement, three to twelve months. Three months catches everything monthly. Twelve is needed if annual subscriptions are possible, because they leave no trace in a shorter window.
2. Apple account. Settings, your name, Subscriptions. The highest hit rate per minute spent.
3. Google Play account. Payments and subscriptions.
4. PayPal. Under automatic payments. These appear in neither Apple nor Google, and on a bank statement only as a PayPal line with no merchant.
5. Your inbox. Search for "subscription", "renewal", "receipt" and "invoice".
Check every card separately. One card's statement says nothing about another, even at the same bank — and it is the rarely used card that carries the subscription running longest unnoticed.
Step two: what to record per subscription
Provider, amount, interval and next renewal date are obvious. Three more decide whether the list stays useful.
The billing route. Whether it bills through Apple, Google, PayPal or the provider directly. This is the field most often skipped and the one that determines *where you cancel*. Cancelling at the provider while the App Store does the billing is the single most common reason a cancellation does nothing.
The payment method. Which card or account pays for it. This looks like bookkeeping until a card expires or gets replaced — at which point it is the only thing that tells you what needs updating. SubTracker records it per subscription, and you can set it on many subscriptions at once from the list rather than opening each one. The reports then break spend down by payment method, so "what does this card carry" is one look rather than an afternoon.
The notice period. Only relevant for a minority of contracts, and decisive for those. See the reminder section below.
Step three: get the billing cadence right
Not everything bills monthly or yearly. Insurance every six months, some software every two months, domain registrations every two or three years.
Rounding those to the nearest standard cycle quietly corrupts every total you calculate afterwards. SubTracker takes a multiplier on the interval — every two months, every six weeks, every three years — and the cost maths, the calendar, the reminders, the calendar feed and the export all follow it.
If a tool cannot express your actual cadence, its monthly total is a guess.
Step four: reminders on the date that matters
The common mistake is noting the contract end date. The date you need is the last day a cancellation still arrives in time — contract end minus notice period.
For an annual contract with three months' notice those are a quarter apart, and someone who remembers the end date finds out on the day that they are three months late.
For contracts with a real notice period, set two reminders: one three months out, one a month out. The first gives you time to decide; the second makes sure the decision is carried out. For anything monthly, one reminder is enough.
Check which of your contracts actually have a notice period longer than a month. In most households it is one to three out of fifteen — and those are the ones worth the second reminder.
Step five: the review that keeps it alive
The list decays without one. Twenty minutes, twice a year, with one question per subscription: what did this cost me per actual use?
Divide the annual cost by the number of times you genuinely used it. Do not estimate — most services keep a history and will tell you. That calculation hits precisely the subscriptions that stopped delivering, and leaves alone the ones you use, which is why it works better than an across-the-board cut.
What this does not do
SubTracker has no bank connection, so it cannot find a subscription you did not enter. That is the trade-off: about ten minutes of setup in exchange for a tool that never sees your account. If your problem is "I have no idea what I am paying for", start with a bank-linked tool for the initial audit, then move the list across with a CSV import rather than retyping it.
It also does not cancel anything for you. It tells you what to cancel and when; the cancelling is yours.