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Hamza
Hamza

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I lost money to forgotten subscriptions, so I built an offline-first Android tracker — solo, no funding, no backend

Not going to open with a pitch — just want to share something I've been building on my own.

The problem

A few months back I checked my bank statement and found I was still being charged for two apps I'd completely forgotten about. Nothing huge, but it bugged me enough to go looking for a subscription tracker.

Every option I found wanted one of three things: create an account, connect my bank, or sync everything to a server — for something as simple as "remind me before this renews." That felt like a lot of trust to ask for, for a fairly small utility.

What I built

Subsight is an Android app that runs 100% offline. No sign-up, no bank linking, nothing leaves the device. You add what you're paying for (there's a quick-add list for common services like Netflix and Spotify), and it tracks renewals, flags price hikes, and breaks down what you're actually spending monthly vs yearly.

A few things I focused on that most trackers skip:

  • Duplicate detection — warns you if you're about to add a subscription you're already tracking
  • Overlap detection — flags when you're paying for two services in the same category (two note apps, two music services, etc.)
  • Everything computed locally — since nothing syncs anywhere, there's genuinely nothing to leak

Why offline instead of cloud-synced

This was a deliberate trade-off, not a limitation I'm excusing. Building a backend means auth, a database, security review, uptime, and a much bigger attack surface for what is fundamentally personal financial data. Going fully local meant I could ship faster as a solo dev and make a stronger privacy claim than a hosted competitor honestly could. The trade-off is no multi-device sync — for a v1, I was fine with that.

Where it's at

It's live on the Play Store, free while I grow it (not a trial — actually free, no hidden paywall in the launch). Built solo, so I'm sure there are rough edges.

If you try it, I'd genuinely appreciate blunt feedback — what's confusing, what's missing, what would make you keep it installed instead of deleting it in a week.

Play Store: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hamzapowerplayer.Subsight]

Happy to go deeper on any of the technical or product decisions in the comments.

Top comments (1)

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paw_dev6789 profile image
Paw

forgotten subscriptions are how i lose money too, i once paid for a thing eleven months after i stopped using it. offline-first with no backend on your own is a lot of choices to make alone. did going offline-first make anything harder than you expected?