How to take stock of your subscriptions

Why subscriptions are hard to see in one place

Subscriptions rarely live in one place. Some charge a card, some leave your bank account as a direct debit, some are billed through an app store, and some are tucked inside another bill entirely.

Because each one is small and renews on its own schedule, the full set is easy to lose track of. Taking stock simply means gathering them into a single list you can actually look at.

Bank and card statements

Statements are the most reliable record, because they show what is actually being charged rather than what you remember signing up for. Going back through recent statements — including any cards you use less often — surfaces the charges that repeat.

Many banking apps also list your active direct debits and standing orders separately, which catches the subscriptions that do not appear as card payments.

• Charges that repeat for the same amount at the same point each month.
• Annual charges, which appear only once a year and are easy to forget in between.
• Billing names that differ from the service’s name — some charges appear under a parent company.
• Recurring charges on cards or accounts you rarely check.

App-store subscription pages

Subscriptions taken out through an app store are listed — and managed — in that store’s account settings rather than inside the individual apps. Each store account has a subscriptions page showing what is active, and often what has lapsed.

If you use more than one platform, or more than one account, each keeps its own separate list, so it is worth looking at each of them when you are building your picture.

Receipts in your inbox

Most subscriptions leave a paper trail by email: a sign-up confirmation, a receipt for each charge, and sometimes a reminder before a renewal. Searching your inbox for the words these emails tend to contain can surface subscriptions you had forgotten about.

The inbox is also where trials tend to show up — a confirmation email for a trial you never cancelled can be the only clue that it quietly converted to a paid subscription.

• Words like "receipt", "invoice", "renewal", and "your subscription".
• Confirmation emails from when you first signed up.
• Reminder or price-change emails, which often arrive shortly before a renewal.

Overlap across your household

In a shared household, subscriptions are often spread across different people, cards, and accounts. It is common to find the same kind of service being paid for more than once — separate streaming, music, or cloud-storage plans — without anyone having decided that on purpose.

Comparing lists with the people you live with shows where services overlap. Whether an overlap is deliberate — separate accounts can be exactly what a household wants — is a question only you can answer.

Keeping the picture up to date

A stocktake is a snapshot. Subscriptions start, change price, and lapse, so a list drawn up once gradually drifts away from what is actually charging you.

PEAMO detects recurring subscriptions and contracts from your connected email and shows them in one place, including renewal dates where it can find them. You can see how that works on the How PEAMO works page.

A note on this guide

This guide is general information to help you understand your own contracts. It is not financial advice or a recommendation, and it does not rank or endorse any provider. Every decision about your contracts remains with you. To see how PEAMO surfaces your contracts and renewals, read How PEAMO works.