I have a weakness for $9/month tools. After a year of "it's basically free" justifications, I decided to find out what I was actually spending. The plan was to use one of the subscription-tracking apps that connects to your card. I never finished the OAuth flow — I didn't want a third party reading my transactions. So I opened a text file and typed the subscriptions by hand.
Name, amount, cadence. That was the whole schema. And it worked better than I expected, right up until the arithmetic.
The copy-list approach is underrated
A plain list forces you to remember what you signed up for, which is half the point. Three entries I'd forgotten about — a discontinued CI add-on, a newsletter I read twice, a design tool I'd migrated off — surfaced only because typing made me think. Apps that auto-import hide that moment of recognition, and they cost you a login and a data hook I wasn't willing to give.
The list also gave me something copyable. I could paste it into a chat, a spreadsheet, or a note. No export button, no locked format. That portability is why I still keep the text file as the source of truth.
Where the manual math breaks
The trap is mixing cadences. I had 14 monthly charges and 9 yearly ones, and adding them in my head produced a number I didn't trust. Monthly times twelve is easy; the yearly ones need converting; and a "every three months" one I'd sneakily subscribed to broke the pattern entirely. I wrote a tiny script to normalize everything to a monthly figure and sum it. The total was higher than my rent.
That normalization step is the actual value a tool adds here. SubTrack takes the same list I was typing — name, amount, monthly or yearly — and returns the total monthly and yearly spend plus the top three you could cut. I didn't need an account or a connection; I needed the arithmetic done right and the obvious cuts surfaced.
The "top cuts" list changed my behavior
The surprise wasn't the total, it was the ranking. The three biggest line items weren't the ones I'd have guessed. Two were yearly charges I'd mentally filed as "cheap" because I only felt the pain once. Seeing them annualized next to the monthly noise reframed the decision. SubTrack puts that ranked shortlist front and center, which is the part of the exercise that leads to actually cancelling something.
The annualized view changed my decisions
The single most useful output wasn't the total — it was seeing yearly charges unfiltered next to monthly ones. I had a domain and a backup service I paid for once a year and had mentally filed as "cheap." Annualized, they were among my top five line items. The monthly-noise framing had been hiding them for a year.
I also caught a duplicate. Two tools with near-identical names had been charging me for months because I'd assumed the second was the first under a rebrand. The text list made the overlap obvious in a way the card statement, with its merchant codes, never did. That's the quiet win of doing this by hand: you see the relationships, not just the totals. The arithmetic a tool adds is the part I'd have botched; the recognition of what to cut is still mine.
FAQ
Why not just let an app connect to my bank?
If you're comfortable with the data access, it's convenient. I preferred typing the list by hand because it made me confront each charge and avoided granting a third party read access to my transactions.
Does mixing monthly and yearly subscriptions cause problems?
Only for the math. You have to normalize everything to one cadence before summing, or the total is meaningless. A tool that does the conversion saves the easy-to-botch step.
How often should I re-run this?
Monthly is enough for most people. The point is catching the slow creep of "it's only nine dollars" decisions, not real-time tracking.
Is this a budgeting app?
No. It totals a subscription list and suggests cuts. It doesn't track spending, categories, or net worth.
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