Finding every subscription
Most people miss a few when they list their subscriptions from memory. Go through three places instead: the last three months of your bank and card statements, the subscription screens of your phone's app store, and your inbox for words like "receipt", "renewal" and "your plan". Three months catch the quarterly charges; for yearly plans, scan a full year of statements once, or search your email for the month you first signed up. Write each one into the field above as you find it, one per line, in the name you will recognize on the statement.
Do not forget the ones that do not feel like subscriptions: domain names and web hosting, cloud storage that grew out of its free tier, a parking app, a warranty plan, a membership that renews on its own, and software you pay for once a year.
What goes in each column
| Column | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Service | The name as it appears on your statement |
| Category | Entertainment, software, health, news, utilities, or your own words |
| Price | What you are charged per billing, including tax |
| Billing cycle | Monthly or Yearly; the spreadsheet reads this word |
| Per month and Per year (spreadsheet) | Nothing to type: both are worked out from the price and the cycle |
| Next renewal | The date of the next charge, or the day a trial ends |
| Payment method | Which card or account the charge hits, so you know what to update when a card expires |
| How to cancel / notes | Where the cancel button is, a notice period, who else in the household uses it |
Monthly and yearly cost side by side
A yearly plan looks cheap next to a monthly one until both are put on the same footing. The spreadsheet does this with two columns: Per month divides a yearly price by twelve, and Per year multiplies a monthly price by twelve. The totals at the bottom and in the summary at the top show what all your subscriptions cost in a month and in a year. The yearly figure is usually the one that makes people cancel something.
On the printed page, add the two totals by hand in the boxes at the bottom. The short line above the boxes reminds you how: monthly prices plus a twelfth of each yearly price for the month, twelve times each monthly price plus the yearly prices for the year. The subscription cost tracker does the same sum on screen and shows which services take the biggest share, which is handy before you commit the numbers to paper.
Deciding what to keep
Go down the list with one question per row: when did I last use this? If the answer is "not this month", write the date you will decide by in the notes and set a reminder. Streaming services are easy to rotate: keep one at a time, watch what you wanted, cancel, and start the next one. Software with a yearly plan deserves a check a month before renewal, when there is still time to export your data and switch.
A price increase is a good moment to look again. The percentage change calculator tells you how much a service went up from the old price to the new one, and the budget planner shows how much of your take-home pay subscriptions should take at most, so you can see whether the total has crept past that line.
Using the renewal and cancel columns
Next renewal is the column that saves money. A free trial that turns into a paid plan, a yearly charge that lands right before the holidays, a plan that renews at a higher price after the first year: all of these are cheaper to handle a week early than a day late. Sort the spreadsheet by that column once a month, or scan the printed page, and put the dates that fall in the next four weeks into your calendar.
How to cancel is worth filling in the day you sign up, while the account settings are open in front of you. Write where the cancel option sits, whether there is a notice period, and whether you have to cancel through the app store rather than on the website. That note turns a twenty-minute search into a two-minute job later.
Related templates
The bill tracker covers the monthly bills that sit next to subscriptions, with a due day and a paid box for each, and the budget spreadsheet has a subscriptions line where the monthly total from this tracker belongs.
Frequently asked questions
Is the subscription tracker free?
Yes. Download the spreadsheet or the PDF as often as you want, for your own subscriptions, your household or a small business. No account, no email address, no watermark. One small line with our web address sits at the bottom of each sheet and page.
How do the Per month and Per year columns work?
Type the price you pay and write Monthly or Yearly under Billing cycle. For a yearly plan, Per month shows the price divided by twelve and Per year shows the price as typed; for anything else, Per month shows the price and Per year shows twelve times the price. The totals at the bottom and in the summary add up those two columns.
What about a plan billed every week or every quarter?
Convert it before you type it: a weekly price times 52 divided by 12 gives the monthly price, a quarterly price divided by three gives the monthly price. Type that monthly figure, write Monthly under Billing cycle and note the real billing rhythm in the notes column so you know where the number came from.
Can I add my own subscriptions?
Yes. Type them into the field above, one per line, up to 30. They print on the PDF and fill the Service column of the spreadsheet with Monthly already in the Billing cycle column. Leave the field empty and you get 6 generic example rows, like streaming service and gym, followed by 18 blank rows.
Why are some characters missing from my service names in the PDF?
The PDF uses a basic font that covers English and most Western European letters, but no emoji and no other scripts such as Greek, Cyrillic or Chinese. Those characters are left out, a few rare accented letters print without the accent, and a note under the field tells you when that happens. The spreadsheet keeps your names exactly as typed.
Which currencies can I use?
Any of the 20 currencies in the list. The spreadsheet formats every amount in the one you pick, and the PDF names it under the title. To switch later, download the file again, or change the number format of the price columns in your spreadsheet program.