Stop Paying a Subscription to Track Your Subscriptions
Paying monthly to track monthly payments makes no sense.
Here is a sentence that should annoy you: most apps that help you cancel subscriptions are themselves subscriptions.
Emma Pro: from about £4.99 a month. Rocket Money Premium: US$6 to $12 a month. TrackMySubs: a paid plan once you track more than a handful. The tool you downloaded to fight recurring charges becomes another recurring charge.
The maths nobody does
£4.99 a month is £59.88 a year. Every year. Forever.
So before your tracker has saved you a single penny, it needs to find £60 of savings just to break even. If it saves you £60 and costs you £60, you have run hard to stand still. Your subscription pile is exactly as big as when you started, just arranged differently.
Stretch that over three years and a £5 a month tracker has cost you £180. That is a streaming service. Two, actually.
How did this happen?
The honest answer: monthly recurring revenue is the best business model in software. Investors love it. Valuations love it. So even companies whose entire mission is freeing you from recurring payments end up charging you one.
We understand why. We just refused to do it.
What we did instead
SubHound's dashboard is free. Add every subscription, direct debit, standing order and annual contract. See it all in one place. No card required.
If you want alerts before renewals, price rises and contract ends, you pay £49. Once. That is the founding deal at the time of writing, and it lasts for life. No renewal, because there is nothing to renew.
It is the old software licence model. You bought it, you owned it, it kept working. Somewhere along the way the industry decided renting your own tools back to you was better. For them, maybe.
When a monthly tracker does make sense
To be fair: if you want full automatic detection and a cancellation service, a paid monthly app can earn its keep, at least for a year while you clean house. Rocket Money's negotiation feature has genuinely lowered bills for people.
But do the maths honestly. Add up what the tracker costs over two or three years, not one month. Then decide.
And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, you know where to find us.