How to find every subscription you're paying for in 20 minutes, without linking your bank

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.

Why nobody has it already

Three places each know a piece, and none knows all of it:

• Apple knows what Apple charged. That’s it.
• Your bank knows everything, but shows it as a statement sorted by date, which is exactly the format in which a repeating charge disappears.
• Your memory covers the monthly ones and loses the annual ones.

So you go to all three. Start with the fastest.

1. The App Store: 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: almost nobody pays for it through the App Store.
• 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.

Write down what’s there and move on.

2. Your statements: ten minutes, and it’s twelve months

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 last step shows why.

3. Your inbox: five minutes

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.

4. Other stores: 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 channels bill separately and won’t appear on any of the lists above.

Before you cancel anything, two things worth knowing

You have the list. Before you start cancelling, two warnings that save trouble.

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 the CFPB says to give that order at least three business days before the payment is scheduled. But the same page 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.

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. 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. The list maintains itself from there.

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