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How to Find and Track Every Subscription You're Paying For

Updated: August 2026

Subscriptions are designed to be forgettable — small amounts, auto-renewed, scattered across four different payment systems. That's why "how much do I spend on subscriptions?" is a question almost nobody can answer from memory. Here's the full audit, in about 15 minutes, followed by the system that keeps the answer true.

Step 1 — The four places subscriptions hide

  1. App Store (iPhone/iPad): Settings → tap your name → Subscriptions. This lists every subscription billed through Apple — active and expired. People routinely find one or two they thought they'd cancelled.
  2. Google Play: Play Store → your profile picture → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions.
  3. Card statements: open the last two months and mark every recurring merchant. Look especially for: streaming video and music, cloud storage, gyms, meal/delivery memberships, news, software, domain and hosting renewals, and anything billed annually — annual charges are the ones people forget hardest.
  4. PayPal and wallets: PayPal → Settings → Payments → Automatic payments. Old services you signed up for years ago love this corner.

Step 2 — Write down three things per subscription

For each one: price, billing cycle (weekly / monthly / yearly), and next renewal date. The renewal date is the piece people skip and the piece that matters most — it's what makes a reminder possible.

Step 3 — Normalize to one monthly number

Yearly plans ÷ 12, weekly plans × 4.33. Convert foreign currencies at today's rate. The resulting single monthly figure is the number to remember — and to compare against what you assumed. For most people the audit finds meaningful money; even one forgotten $9.99/month service is ~$120 a year.

Step 4 — Decide with a simple rule

Step 5 — Keep it true with reminders

The audit decays. New sign-ups appear, trials convert silently, annual renewals land eleven months after you stopped thinking about them. The fix is mechanical, not motivational: keep the list in a tracker that notifies you before each charge, and add every new subscription the moment you sign up — a five-second habit.

That's the exact job SubTide does: a payment calendar, pre-renewal notifications, normalized totals in your currency (with daily conversion for foreign services), and a fast brand picker so entry takes seconds — no bank linking, no account, no ads.

→ SubTide on the App Store

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