Subscription Tracker — Methodology Handbook

The Subscription Tracker is the list of everything you pay for on a schedule — streaming, music, software, AI tools, cloud storage, games, news, the gym, insurance, a phone plan — with what each costs, how often it charges, when it charges next, and whether it is worth keeping. This handbook explains what the tracker stores, how every figure on the page is computed, what the reminders do, and what the tracker deliberately does not do.

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What a subscription is here

One row is one service you pay for repeatedly. It carries:

Service — the name. A known service shows its own logo the moment the name is typed (Netflix, Spotify, ChatGPT, Adobe, Xbox, The New York Times and a few hundred more); for anything else, the service's website address pins the logo, and a glyph from the icon grid is always available instead.
Price and currency — the price of ONE billing cycle, in the currency the service bills you in. A hryvnia phone plan and a dollar streaming service sit side by side; totals convert into the currency you view the site in (see Multi-currency).
Billing cycle — weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, or every N days (a 28-day phone plan, a 90-day supply).
Next charge — the date the next payment is taken. This is the one date the tracker maintains for you (see Charges and the roll-forward).
Category — one of fifteen built in: streaming, music & audio, software, AI tools, cloud & storage, gaming, news & reading, fitness & health, phone & utilities, insurance, finance, education, shopping & delivery, business, other — or one of your own. In Setup you can switch off the built-in ones that never apply (they leave the form and the filter and come back with a click) and add categories with a name and a glyph of your choice; a renamed category follows every subscription that carries it. Categories drive the "where the money goes" chart; the duplicate check looks at the six built-in ones where overlap is rarely intended.
Trial — a subscription can be marked as a free trial with the date it ends. Until that day it is shown as a trial everywhere; on that day it converts into its first real charge.
Status — active, paused, or cancelled. A paused subscription keeps its place and its history but is not counted in the totals and does not charge. A cancelled one stays as history with the date it was cancelled.
Worth it? — your own rating from 1 (should cancel) to 5 (essential). It is the input to the savings suggestions and nothing else; the tracker never rates a service for you.
Details — the plan name, how it is paid, the service's website, the page where it is cancelled (the one every service hides), a per-subscription reminder lead time, notes.

Nothing is derived from a bank feed. What is in the list is what you put there — by hand, from a spreadsheet, or from the recurring lines already in your Expenses ledger.

Totals — the one conversion everything depends on

Every figure that adds subscriptions together first brings each price to a common period:

per year = price × cycles per year, where a week is 52, a month 12, a quarter 4, a year 1, and "every N days" is 365 ÷ N;
per month = per year ÷ 12;
per week = per year ÷ 52.

So a $120 yearly plan is $10 a month, and a $10 monthly plan is $120 a year; a 28-day plan at $30 is 13.04 cycles a year and $32.59 a month. The overview's headline is the monthly total across active subscriptions only — paused and cancelled ones are excluded, trials are included (they are about to charge). The yearly total is the same sum per year, not the monthly figure × 12, so a mix of cycles rounds correctly.

The monthly cap in Setup is a figure you choose; the overview shows how much of it the active total uses, and by how much it is exceeded when it is. The average per service is the monthly total divided by the number of active subscriptions.

Charges and the roll-forward

The tracker keeps a charge log — one row per payment taken — and it fills that log itself:

Every time you open the tracker, each active subscription whose next-charge date is today or earlier has that date written to the log as a charge (at the subscription's current price), and the next-charge date moves forward by one cycle, repeatedly, until it is in the future.
A monthly plan keeps its day of the month: a plan charged on the 31st charges on the 28th in February and returns to the 31st in March. A weekly plan moves seven days; "every N days" moves N days.
A trial that reaches its end date converts: the charge is logged, the trial flag is cleared, and the subscription is an ordinary active one from then on.
Paused and cancelled subscriptions never roll; their dates stay as a record.

The charge log is what the "charged, by month" chart and the calendar's past days draw from — real amounts on real dates, including a price that was different last year. A charge the schedule could not know about (a one-off, a corrected amount) can be added by hand; a wrong one can be deleted.

The log is also what makes the tracker honest across long absences: open it after three months and the three charges each monthly plan took are there, and the next-charge dates are right.

Reminders

A reminder fires a set number of days before each charge and before a trial converts. The lead time is one setting for the whole list (three days by default) and can be overridden per subscription — a yearly plan you want a fortnight's warning on, a trial you want the day before. Reminders arrive as push notifications where those are enabled and appear in the overview's "charging next" list regardless.

The reminder before a trial converts is the single most valuable one the tracker sends, and it is the reason a trial is a first-class thing here rather than a note.

The overview — what it computes

Charging next — every charge in the next thirty days, soonest first, with the total; a trial's conversion is marked as such.
Trials about to convert — active trials ending within thirty days, with the first charge that follows.
Rated "should cancel" — active subscriptions you rated 1 or 2, with their yearly cost, and the yearly sum.
Two of the same — two or more active services in a category where overlap is rarely intended: streaming, music, cloud, news, fitness, AI tools. Software and utilities are not flagged, because two of those is normal.
Could save per year — the yearly cost of everything rated 1–2, plus, for each overlap group, everything except the dearest service in it (the one you keep). It is a ceiling on what letting go would save, not advice.
Prices that changed — every price edit in the last twelve months, from → to, with the yearly effect. The tracker records a price change whenever you edit a subscription's price, so the increases nobody announces are a list, not a memory.
By category — the monthly total split by category, with each category's share.
Charged, by month — the last twelve months of the charge log, summed per calendar month.
Dearest first — active subscriptions ranked by monthly cost, each with its share of the total.

The calendar

The month grid shows charges by day: past days from the charge log, future days projected from each subscription's schedule (the same arithmetic as the roll-forward, run forward instead of back). A trial's conversion day is marked. The month's total and what is still to come this month sit above the grid; the panel beside it lists the picked day's charges, or the next thirty days when no day is picked.

Importing

A spreadsheet — any CSV with at least a service name and a price. Columns are matched from their headers (name, plan, category, price, currency, cycle, next charge, since, trial ends, status, paid with, website, notes) and can be corrected before importing. Cycles are read from words like "monthly", "yearly", "weekly", "quarterly"; a row with no next-charge date is given one a month from today so it never arrives overdue; names already on the list are skipped, so importing the same file twice adds nothing.
The Expenses Tracker — every recurring expense line in your ledger is offered as a subscription, with the ones already on the list unticked. The line's merchant becomes the service, its recurrence the cycle, its next occurrence the next charge.
The Subscription Audit calculator — the list you built there lands here as rows with one click: the price and cycle carried over, the usage level turned into the 1–5 rating (never used → 1, low → 2, medium → 3, high → 4), the next charge set a month out. Names already on the list are skipped, and the free plan's limit applies. The bridge runs the other way too: the Savings view's "run the audit calculator with this list" opens that calculator with every active subscription in place — what letting go of the low-rated ones would be worth invested, on the same numbers.

Export

Every subscription with every field the form collects, and every charge in the log, as one CSV file — free on every plan, always.

Multi-currency

Each subscription is stored in its own currency. Every total, chart and list of amounts converts into the currency selected in the site header at the day's rates, and says so when the list mixes currencies. The list itself shows each row in its own currency; editing a row hands the form the stored values, so a converted figure is never written back as if it were native.

The household book

A subscription list can be kept by more than one person — a family, flatmates, a small team. A shared book is a separate list: everybody in it sees the same subscriptions and the same total; editors add and change services; an administrator sets the book's currency, reminder lead time and cap; a viewer sees everything and changes nothing. Your personal list stays private and is never mixed into a shared one. Charges and price changes inside a shared book belong to the book. Export of a whole book is free for every member. Nothing is shared automatically: a subscription lands in a shared book only when it is added there.

Handing a row to the Expenses Tracker, and the assistant

Any subscription can be sent to the Expenses ledger with one click (the wallet icon on its row): the add form opens there with the price, the service and a matching category filled in, for you to confirm. The site assistant can add a subscription from any page — "add Netflix 17.99 a month on the 27th" — by opening this tracker's add form pre-filled; you review and save.

The AI audit

On Pro, a chat inside the tracker reads the same figures the page shows — totals, the next thirty days, trials, price changes, ratings, overlaps, the charge history — and answers questions about them: what to cancel first and what that saves a year, which trial converts next, what went up, which monthly plans rated 4–5 might be cheaper billed yearly. It quotes the page's numbers and never re-derives a total. It can also fill the add form from a sentence ("add Netflix 17.99 monthly on the 27th"); you review and save. It does not know a service's other plans or prices, and it does not cancel anything for you.

Free and Pro

The free plan keeps up to five active or paused subscriptions with everything above: totals, the calendar, reminders, price history, CSV import and export. Pro removes the limit and adds the AI audit and the household book. Existing subscriptions never disappear when a plan ends; the limit applies to new ones.

What the tracker does not do

It does not connect to a bank or a card. Charges are logged from the schedule you set, not observed on a statement; if a service bills you a different amount, edit the price.
It does not cancel subscriptions. It keeps the cancel link so you can, in one click.
It does not know a service's prices, plans or trial terms. "Annual billing usually saves 15–20 %" is a rule of thumb, not a quote.
It does not detect a subscription you never told it about. The Expenses import and the CSV import are the two ways to catch up.
Ratings are yours. Nothing is rated, flagged or suggested without an input you gave.