The subscription audit checklist that takes 30 minutes

Pull three months of statements, write down every recurring line, then make one decision per line — keep, downgrade, or cancel. The checklist below is the whole job in order, including the traps that hide the most expensive subscriptions.

By the Subby team·Last updated August 12, 2026

Before you start: five minutes of setup

Audits fail for one of two reasons. You run out of steam halfway through, or you finish a perfect list and it evaporates inside a month. Both are fixed the same way — open everything you need before you look at a single charge, and decide up front where the finished list is going to live.

• Three months of bank and card statements. Online banking, a PDF export, the transaction search in your banking app — whatever is fastest to scroll.
• The four billing hubs that hide merchant names: your phone's app store, PayPal, Amazon, and any store account you buy through.
• Somewhere to write the list. A notes app is fine for the next 30 minutes. It will not be fine in eleven months, which is what the final step is about.

Then set a timer. Thirty minutes is deliberately not enough time to be perfect, and that's the design: a fast list covering most of your subscriptions beats a flawless one you never finish.

The 30-minute subscription audit checklist

1. Sort three months of statements by merchant. You're looking for one thing — the same name, at roughly the same amount, in more than one month. Amounts drift with tax and price rises, so match on the name first.
2. Write every repeating line down. Don't judge any of them yet. Capture the name, the amount, the date of the most recent charge and which card it hit. Deciding while you're still listing is what makes people stop at seven entries.
3. Expand the aggregator lines. One statement line can cover several subscriptions. Apple bills under apple.com/bill or itunes.com/bill, Google charges appear as GOOGLE* followed by the seller's name, and PayPal bills under its own name for merchants you'll never see on the statement. Each of those needs opening separately.
4. Open your phone's subscription list. On iPhone, Apple's instructions are the Settings app, then your name, then Subscriptions. On Android, go to subscriptions in Google Play. Both lists only show what that store bills — which is exactly why they're step four, not step one.
5. Open PayPal's automatic payments. Settings, then Payments, then Subscriptions and saved businesses or Automatic Payments. This is where the web-signup services you forgot about tend to be sitting.
6. Open Amazon's memberships page. Your Memberships and Subscriptions lists active, canceled and expired subscriptions with the renewal date and price for each.
7. Add the ones no statement will show you today. Annual renewals that fell outside your three-month window, the gym, insurance, parking, a family plan you pay for, anything bundled into a phone or broadband bill, and anything charged to a partner's card.
8. Make one decision per line: keep, downgrade, or cancel. Ten seconds each. The rules are below.
9. Cancel the cancels in this same sitting. Whoever takes the money owns the cancellation — if Apple or Google billed you, the merchant's own website can't stop the charge, and if a gym bills you directly, neither store can. Keep every confirmation email.
10. Write the next renewal date beside every survivor, then give the list a home. This is the step that decides whether you do this again next August or never need to.

Keep, downgrade, or cancel — in ten seconds a line

• Keep if you used it in the last 30 days and you'd notice it gone this week.
• Downgrade if you use it but not at this tier. The three that actually move money: switch to the ad-supported tier, switch from monthly to annual billing on anything you're certain about, and drop from a family plan you're the only user of.
• Cancel if you can't remember the last time you opened it, or you can't say out loud what it does for you.

One rule saves a lot of agonizing: when you genuinely can't decide, keep it and set a reminder for the day before its next renewal. A decision you make with the charge in front of you is much easier than one you make in the abstract, and you've lost nothing but one cycle.

The four things people miss

• Trials that already converted. They don't look like trials on a statement any more. They look like a small charge you assume you approved.
• The second account. An old email address with its own app store subscriptions attached, or a work account paying for something personal.
• Paused, not canceled. Pausing stops the charge for a defined window and then resumes it. That's a reminder you need to set, not a problem you've solved.
• Uninstalled, not canceled. Deleting the app never stops the billing — both Google Play and Netflix say so explicitly in their own help pages. The charge outlives the icon.

Step ten is the only one that still matters next year

Everything above produces a snapshot, and a snapshot decays. What you actually want is a list that reaches forward: every survivor carrying its next payment date, its billing cycle, and a reminder that fires before the money moves rather than after.

That's the job Subby does. You add each entry yourself from 600+ built-in service presets, set the billing cycle (eight presets plus any custom cadence you need), and choose how far ahead you want to be reminded — same-day, a few days out, or a custom lead time. Nothing is connected to your bank, there's no account to create, and the list stays on your device. If you'd rather not retype a screenful of charges, PRO's AI screenshot import reads the service, price and cycle off a screenshot and hands them back for you to confirm before anything is saved.

The other half of the payoff is quieter: when you cancel something, mark it as canceled instead of deleting it. Next year's audit takes five minutes because you can see exactly what you already decided about, and why.