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How to find all my subscriptions (and what I'm actually paying for)

· 4 min read

To find all your subscriptions, check five places: your card and bank statements for the last three months, your Apple ID or Google Play subscriptions list, PayPal's automatic payments, your Amazon memberships, and your inbox. No single one of them sees everything — a streaming plan billed through Apple never shows up in PayPal, and a gym billed straight to your card never shows up in either app store. Fifteen minutes across all five gives you the full list.

Here's where to look, what a subscription looks like in each place, and what to do once you've found them.

Start with your card statements

Your statements are the only place every subscription eventually lands, whoever bills it. Download the last three months from each card and bank account — most banks offer a CSV or Excel export — and look for:

PatternWhat it usually is
Same merchant, same amount, same day each montha monthly subscription
One charge a year you don't recognizean annual renewal
Small charges, often a few dollarsapp add-ons, cloud storage, news sites
A charge that started right after a "free" weeka trial that converted
The same merchant, a slightly higher amount than beforea price increase you weren't told about loudly

Three months matters: a single month hides quarterly charges and tells you nothing about price creep. If you have a year of history, even better — annual renewals are the ones people forget most.

A spreadsheet makes this quick: sort by description, and repeats line up next to each other.

Check Apple and Google Play

Subscriptions bought inside apps are billed by the app store, so the statement only says "Apple" or "Google" — not which app. Look them up where they're managed:

  • iPhone or iPad: Settings → your name → Subscriptions. You'll see active and expired subscriptions and can cancel from there.
  • Android: open the Google Play Store app → tap your profile picture → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions.

If your family shares purchases, check each person's account: a subscription belongs to whoever started it.

Check PayPal, Amazon and other wallets

  • PayPal: in Settings, look for Payments and then Manage automatic payments. Anything you've authorized to bill you again lives there.
  • Amazon: Account → Memberships & Subscriptions lists Prime, channels and "Subscribe & Save" style deliveries.
  • Other wallets and stores: if you pay through another wallet, a game platform or a smart TV store, each keeps its own subscriptions list.

Search your inbox

Services almost always email a receipt or a renewal notice. Search your mail for words like "subscription", "renewal", "your receipt", "trial" and "membership". Sort by sender, and forgotten services surface quickly — including ones billed to an old card you no longer check.

Cancel where you subscribed

Cancel through the same place that bills you: app-store subscriptions in the app store, PayPal subscriptions in PayPal or with the merchant, direct card subscriptions on the service's own website. Deleting an app does not cancel its subscription. After cancelling, keep the confirmation email, and look at next month's statement to make sure the charge stopped.

Keep the list from growing back

Small charges add up faster than they feel. Three forgotten subscriptions at $9.99, $12.99 and $4.99 a month come to $27.97 a month, or $335.64 a year. Add yours and see the yearly number:

try your own numbers

What your subscriptions really cost

$27.97 a month $335.64 a year

Once a month, look through the month's spending for anything that repeats. It takes five minutes if your spending is already in one place. Tratobor helps with that part: import your card's CSV or Excel export and it sorts every row by category and shows your spending month by month, so a charge that keeps coming back is easy to spot. To be clear, tratobor.com doesn't have an automatic subscription finder yet — the looking is still yours, it's just faster when everything is in one list. For the full routine, see how to track expenses in 10 minutes a week, and for other tools, our comparison of expense tracker apps.

FAQ

What subscriptions do I have right now?

Your card statements are the only complete answer, because every subscription ends up there. Check the last three months, then look up anything billed as "Apple" or "Google" in your app store's subscriptions list.

Why can't I find a subscription that's charging me?

It's usually billed through a middleman — an app store, PayPal or a wallet — or to a card you don't check often. Search your inbox for the merchant's name, and check every card and account, including old ones.

Does deleting an app cancel the subscription?

No. The subscription keeps renewing until you cancel it where it's billed: in the App Store or Google Play settings, in PayPal, or on the service's website.

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Snap a receipt (photos are read once you sign in with an emailed code) or bring your spending as a spreadsheet — Tratobor sorts it by category and shows repeat buys, your personal inflation and which card earns more. Photos aren't stored; spreadsheets are parsed right in your browser.

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