How to track subscriptions without linking a bank account
You don't need to connect a bank account to track subscriptions: you enter each one once, and the app handles the dates and the reminders from there. Bank-linked apps trade that setup session for read access to your transactions, and they still can't see a free trial that hasn't charged you yet.
The short answer
You add each subscription once — service, price, billing cycle, next payment date — and the app does the date math and the reminding from there. No bank credentials, no open-banking consent, no read access to your transaction history. The trade is real and worth stating plainly: you spend one setup session building the list, and in exchange nothing about your spending has to leave your phone.
Why bank-linked trackers exist
They solve a genuine problem. If you honestly don't know what you're paying for, an app that reads a year of transactions and flags the repeating ones will surface things you'd never have remembered to type in. That's the whole pitch, and it works.
What it costs is access. To read those transactions the app connects to your bank — through a data aggregator or through open banking — and keeps that connection alive. For several of these apps the connection isn't a feature you switch on later; it's the price of entry, and you can't use the product without it. Named, dated comparisons of the apps in both camps live on our best subscription tracker apps page.
Whether that's a fair trade is your call, not ours. Plenty of people make it happily. It's worth making it knowingly.
What a bank feed can't see
Transaction scanning is pattern-matching on money that already moved. Four blind spots follow directly from that:
- A free trial that hasn't charged yet. There's no transaction, so there's nothing to detect. This is the most expensive gap of the four, because the trial is exactly the thing you meant to cancel in time.
- Annual renewals. A yearly charge only looks recurring if the app is looking back far enough to have seen the previous one.
- Anything on a different card. The family plan on your partner's account, the gym on the joint account, the tool on the work card — none of it is in the feed you connected.
- Charges billed through an aggregator. When a service is billed through an app store or a payment processor, the statement line carries the processor's name rather than the service's, so one line can stand for several subscriptions. The authoritative breakdown lives in the store's own subscription list — Apple's is under Settings, your name, then Subscriptions; Google's is under Payments & subscriptions in the Play Store.
Manual entry has the mirror-image weakness, and it's a real one: it only knows what you tell it. If you've genuinely forgotten a service exists, no manual tracker will surface it for you. Which is why the first hour matters more than the app you pick.
Build the list from twelve months, not three. A ninety-day look-back misses every annual renewal, and annual renewals are the ones that sting — largest amounts, longest gaps, least memorable. Work back through a year of statements, then open the billing pages that hide merchant names behind their own: the App Store, Google Play, PayPal and your mobile carrier.
What manual-first looks like in practice
The fear is that "manual" means a spreadsheet you'll abandon in March. It doesn't. In Subby, adding one runs Service, then Price, then Extras: search 600+ built-in services and the logo and brand colour fill themselves in, type the amount and pick a currency, then choose the billing cycle and how far ahead you want warning. About twenty seconds once you have the price in front of you.
Cycles cover the eight common ones — weekly, biweekly, four-weekly, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly — plus custom cadences for the things that bill every 45 days for reasons nobody can explain. After that the app carries the calendar: the next due date is always derived from the previous due date, so a month with 31 days never quietly shifts your renewal.
If typing is the part you know you'll skip, PRO adds screenshot import. Screenshot a confirmation email, a receipt or a store page, and Subby reads the service, price and billing cycle and fills the form in for you to confirm before anything is saved. It's also the one feature that sends anything off your device: only the screenshot you pick is sent, it's processed by an AI service, and it isn't stored after processing. It's rate-limited, so treat it as a shortcut rather than a bulk importer.
Which approach fits you
| If this matters most | Bank-linked | Manual-first |
|---|---|---|
| Finding charges you've completely forgotten | Strong — it's the whole point | Weak — it only knows what you enter |
| Catching a trial before the first charge | Blind until money moves | Strong — you set the reminder the day you sign up |
| Subscriptions billed outside the linked card | Invisible | Covered — you decide what goes in |
| What the app needs from you | A live connection to your accounts | An evening and the prices |
| Where the sensitive data sits | With the app and its data provider | On your device |
| Effort after setup | None | Seconds per new subscription |
Choose a bank-linked tracker if your real problem is discovery — you suspect there are charges you couldn't name, and you're comfortable granting read access to find them. Choose a manual-first tracker if you already roughly know what you pay for and the job is remembering the dates, or if handing an app your banking access is a line you'd rather not cross.
Where Subby's data actually lives
- No account. No sign-up, no email, no password. Open it and start.
- On your device. Your subscription list is stored locally, and there is no server-side copy of it.
- Backups go to your cloud, not ours. PRO adds automatic weekly backup to your own Google Drive, and to iCloud on iPhone, keeping the last three. It's backup, not live sync — and moving between platforms works through Drive, because iCloud is iPhone-only.
- What does leave the phone. The screenshot you pick for PRO import, plus analytics and crash reporting, plus ad requests on the free tier — ads are consent-gated in the EEA and UK. We're not going to claim nothing leaves your phone, because that isn't true of any app with a banner in it.
- The unlock is per store. Your list moves between Android and iPhone through your own Drive backup. The PRO unlock stays with the store you bought it from.
That's the entire boundary. A bank connection doesn't appear anywhere in it, because there isn't one to appear.
No bank login. No account. Just your list.
Add your subscriptions once and Subby reminds you before each one renews — start with the free version.
Free · No account · No bank login