Find all your subscriptions: the 5 places they hide, and what each one misses

Try to write down, from memory, everything that will charge you next month. No looking.

Most people stall at seven or eight, and the annual ones are always missing, which are the expensive ones. That isn’t bad memory. That list doesn’t exist anywhere. Each one was signed up for separately, in a different month, in a different place, and nobody ever wrote the whole thing down.

Here is how to write it, step by step and against the clock. Twenty minutes, and you don’t have to hand your bank login to anyone.

What subscriptions do I have? The five places to look

There is no screen that answers this. Five places each hold a piece, and each one is blind to something the others catch.

Where you look	What it covers	What it misses
Apple, Settings → Subscriptions	Anything signed up for inside an app and billed by Apple	Anything bought on a website, charged to a card, or billed by another store
Twelve months of statements, every card	Every charge that left your account	Nothing, but a list sorted by date is the format in which a repeating charge disappears
PayPal, automatic payments	Older subscriptions that appear on the statement as PayPal, not as the service	Anything billed straight to the card
Your inbox	The real service name, and notices that arrive before the charge lands	Anything whose receipts you deleted, or never got
Google Play and Amazon	Leftovers from an Android phone, and Prime Video channels	Everything else

Read the last column before the middle one. Every stop you skip takes its blind spot with it, and you finish holding a list you believe is complete.

Start with the fastest.

How to check subscriptions billed by Apple: two minutes

On your iPhone:

1. Open Settings and tap your name at the top.
2. Tap Subscriptions.

You’ll see what renews, when the next charge lands, and where to cancel. The exact path is in Apple’s support documentation.

Now the important part: that’s one slice, and rarely the expensive one. That screen shows only what was signed up for inside an app and billed by Apple. It won’t show:

• Anything you signed up for on a company’s website, even if you use it on your iPhone. Netflix is the classic: it closed Apple billing to most new members, so most new signups never land here.
• Anything billed to a card or by direct debit: the gym, insurance, internet, phone, the storage unit.
• Anything paid through another store.

That isn’t an Apple failure or something you fix by looking harder. Apple only knows what Apple charged. And Settings is one of four Apple screens worth checking: Wallet keeps a second list of Apple Pay merchants, mostly with names and no prices.

Write down what’s there and move on.

How to see all subscriptions on your card: twelve months of statements

This is the step that actually works, and the one most people get wrong twice.

First mistake: opening this month instead of the last twelve. An annual charge appears once a year, so a single month’s statement doesn’t contain it. And the annual ones are usually the most expensive on the list.

Second mistake: checking the bank account and stopping there. In the US most subscriptions land on a credit card, not a checking account. Go through every card you use, not just the account.

What to look for:

• Amounts that repeat. The same number, or nearly, landing with regularity.
• The same merchant string. Most banks let you search by text: try the service name if you already suspect one.
• The heavy months. January concentrates annual renewals, because January is when people sign up for things.

And two that always get missed:

• The small ones. Three dollars doesn’t hurt once and that’s why nobody looks. Across a year it does.
• Charges with an unreadable name. Payment processors often appear under their own name, not the service’s. If you don’t recognise a repeating charge, search the merchant string exactly as written.

Write down the name, the amount, and the day of the month it lands. The date matters as much as the amount, and the billing cycle behind that date is what decides how many times a year it charges you.

How to check subscriptions billed through PayPal

Almost every guide to this skips PayPal, and the subscriptions hiding there tend to be the oldest ones you have.

A subscription set up through PayPal often hides behind PayPal’s name on your statement. Paid from a bank account, it reads PAYPALINST XFER, with no business name at all. Paid by card, it reads PayPal followed by a short name the business chose, which may not match the service you know. The full picture lives inside PayPal, which is why you have to go and get it there.

On the website: Settings, then Payments, then Subscriptions and saved businesses or Automatic Payments. In the app: the Subscriptions or Linked Businesses page. PayPal documents both paths.

What you get is a list of every business you gave standing permission to charge you, with each merchant named properly. Expect two kinds of entry:

• Things you signed up for years ago and stopped using without cancelling. The billing agreement carries on long after you stopped opening the app, because nothing in the arrangement depends on you using it.
• Services you thought you were paying by card. If it went through PayPal once at signup, it has been going through PayPal ever since.

The same applies to any other wallet you have paid through. Whatever you set up inside it was recorded there and nowhere else, so that’s where you have to look.

Your inbox: five minutes, and it gives you the real names

Search your email using the words they write, not the words you’d use:

• receipt
• invoice
• your subscription
• has renewed
• automatic renewal
• thanks for your order

Your inbox gives you two things your statement can’t: renewal notices arrive before the charge, and the real service name shows up where the statement had gibberish.

Check the promotions tab and spam too. That’s where half the renewal notices end up.

Other stores: Google Play and Amazon, three minutes

If you had an Android phone before, something may still be billing through it. Check your Google Play subscriptions.

Same with Amazon: Prime Video add-on subscriptions, which used to be called channels, bill separately from Prime. Check them in your Prime Video account, under Subscriptions.

How many apps am I paying for? Read the list you just built

The list exists now. Before you cancel anything on it, read it once for shape rather than for amounts, and look for three things.

• The count is higher than the number you guessed at the start. Whatever you couldn’t name from memory is the part of your spending you weren’t deciding on, which is the part worth your attention.
• The annual ones carry more weight than they felt like. You meet the charge once a year, so you file it as small, and the yearly figure says otherwise.
• The monthly total is not the yearly total divided by twelve. Quarterly, semiannual and four weekly cycles each land a different number of times a year, and a four weekly charge lands thirteen times rather than twelve.

Add the amounts up on a yearly basis. The monthly figure is the one that made each of these look affordable when you signed up, and it will do the same thing again while you read the list.

Before you cancel anything, two things worth knowing

Stopping the payment is not cancelling the service. This is the one people get wrong. You can tell your bank to stop an automatic payment with a stop payment order, and federal rules say to give it at least three business days before the payment is scheduled. But the CFPB is explicit that cancelling the payment does not cancel your contract with the company: you may still owe the money. Banks also commonly charge a fee for a stop payment order.

Cancelling happens where you signed up. Not at your bank, and not in the App Store if Apple isn’t the one charging you. If you signed up on a website, the cancellation lives on that website. If you signed up through PayPal, cancelling the billing agreement in PayPal stops the payment, and the paragraph above still applies to the contract.

What nobody tells you: the list expires

You have the picture now. The problem is that it is a picture.

In two months you’ll have signed up for something new, something else will have raised its price, and the annual charge you wrote down will still be ten months away. Doing this round again every quarter is exactly what nobody does, which is why most people run this audit once in their life and abandon it.

So the last step isn’t saving the list. It’s putting it somewhere that maintains it, with each expense recorded on its real billing cycle. That’s where most tools fall over: if you enter the semiannual insurance as “monthly, divided by six”, you’ve just thrown away the charge date, which was half of what you went digging through statements to find.

What Kelo does about it

Kelo is where that list lives afterwards. You enter each expense once, recurring or one off, and it tells you what this month costs and which day each charge lands. With Premium, it warns you before each one, so you don’t find out after the fact.

And the cost of privacy here should be stated plainly, because it’s real: Kelo doesn’t connect to your bank or ask for your login, so you enter that first list yourself using the round above. There’s no magic. In exchange, you don’t hand your banking credentials to anyone, and you don’t depend on a bank connection breaking or on a service guessing wrong at an unreadable merchant string.

You do the round once. After that, Kelo moves every date forward on its own, and you only add what’s new.

It’s iPhone only, and it’s free to start.