Cord cutting has long been touted as the answer to costly monthly cable bills. Don't pay for channels you never watch; just stream your favorite shows online.
That was the dream, but TV and cable execs have caught on. If you want all that prestige TV has to offer—Stranger Things on Netflix, The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Video, Star Trek: Picard on CBS All Access, The Mandalorian on Disney+, and countless other UK, Danish, Australian, and Korean dramas you never knew you needed in your life—things get expensive pretty fast.
Then there's the music you listen to, the workouts you stream, the comics you read, and the video games you play. Every piece of content you could consume has its own subscription service that will bill you on a monthly (or yearly) basis. So that begs the question: Are you paying attention? Unless you meticulously examine your credit card statement each month, a small bump in price on your favorite streaming service—or a free trial automatically converting into a paid subscription—is easy to miss.
Mastercard now has a policy requiring merchants to get a cardholder's approval at the end of a trial before they start billing, but that's just for free trials. There are apps and websites that will notify you when a service hikes prices and help you cancel any services you're not using. Many also provide financial aid services. You may even be able to manage your subscriptions directly from the App Store or Google Play store on your phone. Here's how to get started.
Subby
On Android, Subby requires you to enter recurring paid subscriptions manually. Add types of payment, create categories, and set reminders. Once the app notifies you of an impending charge, you can note when you've paid the bill. A $2.99 in-app Pro upgrade will remove ads, allow data to be backed up to Google Drive, offer access to the Subby widget, and give you the ability to request icons for apps that don't have them.
Truebill
Once you set up Truebill on your phone (iOS, Android) and link your bank account, the app will automatically fill in your financial data. Monitor spending from the custom dashboard, keep track of your spending and set up a budget. You can also set up a savings account, add alerts and notifications, and cancel unwanted subscriptions.
Each recurring payment on your account will be grouped together in the app, allowing you to monitor them in one place. Inspect a service to see how much you have spent on it or change how the app keeps track of it. If you want to cancel the service, Truebill provides you with the contact information you need.
A Premium version starts at $3 per month, and provides automated cancellations, custom categories, smart savings features, automatic refunds, live chat support, and the ability to sync your account. Other services like bill negotiation and outage refunds, cost a percentage of your savings.
Trim
Trim does a little bit of everything. Set up an account with an email address or Facebook account, link your phone and bank, then answer some questions about your finances. Trim will help you manage charges, eliminate debt, negotiate your bills, and more.
Set up a spending budget, create reminders and notifications, and even open a savings fund. You can even compare your spending habits to other Trim users to get a sense of how well you're doing. Most importantly to our interests here, Trim will also pull out subscriptions. If there's something you don't recognize, Trim can investigate what the charge is and how it got there.
Bill negotiation and Trim Simple Savings are paid services; pricing varies—like 33 percent of your total yearly savings for bill negotiation.
Manage Subscriptions on iOS or Android
If you subscribed to a service through the App Store on your iPhone or iPad, you can manage these subscriptions right on the device. Navigate to Settings > [your name] > Subscriptions (if you don't have any, this will not appear) to view your services. Tap the service you want to cancel and select Cancel Subscription.
Android users can do the same from Google Play by opening the hamburger menu and tapping the Subscriptions tab to view a list of recurring purchases. Here, you can edit payment options or cancel the subscription completely.
TrackMySubs
TrackMySubs.com requires you to manually add subscriptions; it doesn't include every subscription service out there, but you can create new ones when necessary. Once data is entered, TrackMy Subs will display the cost of each subscription and when the service is due to renew. Set up notifications, add attachments, and view payment history for each entry. The service's free tier allows you to track up to 10 services with 10MB of storage. Increase the number of subscriptions, storage, alerts, and payments types with a TrackMySubs subscription that starts at $5 per month.
Subscro
Subscro allows you to track subscriptions or bills of any kind in an easy-to-use interface. Just manually add the name, rate, and payment period for any services you have. Subscro will color-code each entry by how expensive they are, and notify you when the payment date is coming up. As an added bonus, you receive Bitcoins from the service for adding bills into the system.