How to Find and Cancel Subscriptions You Forgot About

Subscriptions are designed to be easy to start and easy to forget. A free trial becomes a paid plan, an annual renewal arrives a year after you last thought about it, and small monthly charges hide among bigger ones. Finding them takes about 15 minutes; here's where to look and what to do with each one.

Where to look

1. Card and bank statements. Go back three months (six if you can) and look for charges that repeat. Search the statement for "subscription", "membership", "monthly", "recurring" and "renewal".
2. Your iPhone. Settings → tap your name → Subscriptions. Anything bought inside an app is billed by Apple, so it shows on your statement as Apple rather than the app's name.
3. Your Android phone. Google Play → tap your profile → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions.
4. PayPal and other wallets. PayPal lists automatic payments in its settings; companies charged there may not appear on your card statement by name.
5. Your email. Search for "receipt", "your subscription", "renews" and "trial".

Add them up before you decide

Put every subscription in one list with what you actually pay and how often. The free subscription tracker turns weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly plans into a single yearly total, and adds up what you'd save by cancelling the ones you mark. Seeing the yearly number is usually what makes the decision easy.

Keep, pause or cancel

• Keep what you used in the last month and would sign up for again today at this price.
• Pause or downgrade what you use sometimes: many services offer a cheaper tier, an ad-supported plan or a pause.
• Cancel anything you haven't used in a month or two. You can almost always come back later.
• Share where the terms allow a family plan, and split the cost fairly with the split bill calculator.

How to cancel

Cancel where you pay. For app-store subscriptions, cancel in the same iPhone or Google Play screen you found them in; deleting the app does not stop the charge. For everything else, use the account or billing page on the service's website. Take a screenshot of the confirmation. If a cancellation is hard to find, the service's help page usually has a direct link.

After cancelling, watch the next statement to confirm the charge stopped. Most services keep access until the end of the period you've paid for.

Stop it happening again

• Add every subscription you keep to your bill tracker with its renewal date and a reminder, so you get a nudge before each charge, not after.
• When you start a free trial, add it straight away at its full price with a reminder the day before the trial ends.
• Repeat the audit twice a year, or whenever a price goes up. The bill increase calculator shows what a rise costs over a year.