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 ten steps below go in that order, and they include the traps that hide your most expensive subscriptions.

By the Subby team·Last updated September 2, 2026

Five minutes of setup before you start

Subscription 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 have the same fix. Open everything before you look at a single charge, and decide up front where the finished list will live.

• Three months of bank and card statements. Online banking, a PDF export or the transaction search in your banking app, whichever is fastest to scroll.
• The four accounts 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 will do for the next 30 minutes, and so will the free subscription tracker spreadsheet. Neither one will still be right in eleven months, which is step ten's problem.

Then set a timer. Thirty minutes is not enough time to be perfect, and it is not meant to be. 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 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. If the names themselves are the problem, we wrote a longer guide on how to find subscriptions on your bank statement.
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 show up as GOOGLE* followed by the seller's name, and PayPal bills under its own name, so the merchant you signed up with never reaches the statement at all. Open each of those separately.
4. Open your phone's subscription list. On iPhone that's Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions. On Android it's the subscriptions page in Google Play. Both lists show only what that store bills, so they are step four and not step one.
5. Open PayPal's automatic payments. Settings, then Payments, then Subscriptions and saved businesses or Automatic Payments. The services you signed up for on a website, rather than through an app store, are usually sitting here.
6. Open Amazon's memberships page. Your Memberships and Subscriptions lists active, canceled and expired subscriptions, each with its renewal date and price.
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 neither store can stop a gym that bills you directly. The gym is its own errand, so start from how to cancel a gym membership. Keep every confirmation email.
10. Write the next renewal date beside every survivor, then hand the list to something that will nag you. 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 enough to justify the plan you're on. Switch to the ad-supported tier, move from monthly to annual billing on anything you're sure about, or drop the 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.

When you can't decide, keep it and set a reminder for the day before its next renewal. Deciding with the charge in front of you is easier than deciding in the abstract, and the worst case is one more 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 set window and then resumes it, so set a reminder for the day it restarts.
• Deleting the app. It never stops the billing. Google Play and Netflix both say so in their own help pages.

Step ten is the only one that still matters next year

Everything above gets you a list that is right today. To be right a year from now it needs the next payment date and the billing cycle on every line, and something that reads those and warns you before the money moves.

Add each survivor to Subby yourself. It will never find a subscription you missed, because nothing connects to your bank, and for the same reason there is no bank login and no account. Each entry takes the service from the 600+ built-in list, the amount, one of eight billing cycles or a custom one, and the renewal date you just wrote down. The list stays on your device, and the reminder arrives same-day, a few days out, or at whatever lead time leaves you room to cancel. If retyping the whole list is what will stop you, screenshot the subscriptions page you opened in step four and hand it to PRO's screenshot import. It reads the service, price and cycle, and you confirm each one before it saves.

When you cancel something, mark it as canceled instead of deleting it. Next year's audit takes five minutes, because you can see what you already decided and why.