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A paid subscription tracker costs about $100 a year. Monarch‘s Core plan is $99.99 a year; YNAB is $109 a year or $14.99 a month. Both have their fans. Both are also, themselves, subscriptions — which is an odd way to solve having too many.
The free alternative is not one tool. It’s four things you mostly already have, stacked so each covers the others’ blind spots. The only question that decides whether it works for you: will you spend ten minutes a month looking at a list? If yes, you don’t need to pay anyone. If you honestly won’t, skip to the verdict.
Layer 1: the subscription lists that already exist
Most of your subscriptions are already listed somewhere, for free, by the company that bills you. The problem is that there are several lists and none of them shows the others.
Apple. On an iPhone or iPad: Settings → tap your name → Subscriptions. Apple’s own help page gives the same path for Vision Pro, and via the App Store on a Mac. Every App Store subscription billed to your Apple Account is here. Apple notes that if there’s no Cancel button, or you see an expiration message in red, it’s already cancelled — useful for telling live charges from dead ones.
Google Play. Google’s help page points to the subscriptions section of Google Play, on the web or in the Play Store app. The line on that page worth memorising: uninstalling an app does not cancel its subscription. Deleting an app you stopped using is how a charge becomes invisible.
PayPal. Settings → Payments → Subscriptions and saved businesses or Automatic Payments, per PayPal’s help centre. This is where the oldest forgotten subscriptions tend to live, because PayPal was the default way to pay online a decade ago.
Amazon. Your Account → Memberships & Subscriptions holds Prime, channel add-ons, Audible, Kindle Unlimited and Subscribe & Save in one place.
These four lists are the free equivalent of a tracker’s “connected accounts” screen. Check them once to build your master list; after that, you only need them when something new appears. Our cancellation guide walks through them in more detail, plus the bank-statement search strings that catch everything billed directly to a card.
Layer 2: a five-column spreadsheet
A tracker app is, underneath, a table. You can build the same table in Google Sheets — or any spreadsheet, or a notes app — in about fifteen minutes. Five columns are enough:
| Service | Amount | Billed every | Annual cost | Renews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Streaming service A | $17.99 | month | $215.88 | 3rd |
| Music app | $11.99 | month | $143.88 | 14th |
| Cloud storage | $2.99 | month | $35.88 | 22nd |
| Antivirus | $59.99 | year | $59.99 | 9 Mar |
| News site | $4.00 | week | $208.00 | Mondays |
| Total | $663.63 |
Example figures only — not quotes of any real service’s price. Use your own statement.
The column that does the work is Annual cost, because monthly pricing is designed to feel small. The formulas are the whole trick:
- Billed monthly: amount × 12
- Billed weekly: amount × 52 (not × 4 — that undercounts by four weeks a year)
- Billed yearly: amount × 1
- Billed quarterly: amount × 4
In a spreadsheet, if the amount is in B2 and the period in C2, one formula handles all four:
=B2*IF(C2="week",52,IF(C2="month",12,IF(C2="quarter",4,1)))
Look at the example again. The $4-a-week news subscription has one of the smallest price tags on the page and the second-largest annual cost, $208 a year. Weekly billing is the easiest price to underestimate, and it’s exactly what this column exists to catch. Annual plans have the opposite problem — cheap per month, but one large charge you forget until it lands; see annual vs monthly billing for when that trade is worth taking.
Layer 3: two alerts that replace the “automatic” part
What a paid tracker adds over a spreadsheet is noticing new charges without you looking. You can get most of that for free with two settings.
1. Transaction alerts in your banking app. Most bank and card apps can push a notification for every charge, or for charges above an amount you choose. Set the threshold at $1 on the card your subscriptions run through. A new recurring charge then announces itself the day it happens — sooner than a monthly tracker review would catch it.
2. A calendar reminder seven days before every annual renewal and every free-trial end. Take the date from the Renews column. Seven days is enough to cancel even with services that make you phone or chat. This is the step that catches the charges that hurt most: a single annual renewal is often larger than a year of a small monthly one.
If you want the alert layer to be stricter, a separate card used only for subscriptions makes the whole statement your tracker. We looked at whether that’s worth paying for in virtual cards for subscriptions.
Layer 4 (optional): a free tier that does the detection
If typing the list yourself is the part you know you’ll never do, there’s a halfway house. Rocket Money‘s own site lists Subscription Management — “find all of your recurring subscriptions and bills” — as part of its free plan, with cancellation help and other extras reserved for Premium.
That is technically an app, which breaks this article’s premise. It’s here because it’s free, and because letting it build your first list, then copying that list into your own spreadsheet, gets you the automatic detection without the annual fee.
The calculation: what the free system costs in time
Free isn’t free if it eats your evenings. So price the time.
- Setup: one sitting of about 45 minutes — check the four lists, search twelve months of statements, fill in the spreadsheet, set the alerts and reminders.
- Upkeep: about 10 minutes a month — scan the alerts, add anything new, delete anything cancelled.
That’s 2 hours a year of upkeep, or 2¾ hours in the first year once setup is included. Against Monarch Core’s $99.99, you’d be paying about $36 an hour to skip it in year one and $50 an hour every year after. Against YNAB’s $109, about $40 and $55.
And that overstates what a paid app saves, because a paid app doesn’t skip the review. It still shows you a list, and you still have to read it and cancel things. What it actually replaces is the typing — mostly the 45-minute setup. Put another way: paying $99.99 a year to avoid a 45-minute job you do once is the expensive way to do it.
The other break-even to run is the one we use for every tracker: a $99.99-a-year app has to find $8.33 a month of subscriptions you’d otherwise keep paying for, every year, just to cover itself. Most people find dead subscriptions once, cancel them, and then find very little. After year one, the tracker is often the most expensive recurring charge on its own list.
Where the free system genuinely fails
Be honest about the weak points before you rely on it.
- More than one person spending. Two adults with separate cards means two sets of alerts and one spreadsheet that both have to update. The first time one of you forgets, the list is wrong and nobody knows. That’s the real case for a paid app, and for households it’s a strong one — our family tracker comparison covers which ones include a second adult at no extra cost.
- Lots of cards and accounts. Above three or four cards, the alert noise gets heavy and the statement search gets slow.
- People who don’t open spreadsheets. If you already know you won’t maintain it, a free system you abandon is worth less than a paid one you use.
The verdict
Use the free system if your subscriptions run through one or two cards, one person manages them, and you’ll give it ten minutes a month. Four built-in lists, one five-column sheet, a $1 alert and a calendar reminder do almost everything a $100-a-year tracker does.
Use Rocket Money’s free tier to start if building the list by hand is the part you’ll never get round to. Let it find the charges, then decide whether you need anything more.
Pay for Monarch Core ($99.99 a year) instead if two adults share the money across separate cards and both need to see the same list. That’s the case the free system handles worst.
Don’t buy a paid tracker if your forgotten charges come to less than about $8.33 a month, or you only want to find them once. Do the 45-minute audit, cancel what’s dead, keep the spreadsheet — and don’t replace a pile of forgotten subscriptions with a new one that exists to watch them.
Verified 29 September 2026. Monarch Core’s $99.99 a year was read from monarch.com/pricing and YNAB’s $109 a year and $14.99 a month from ynab.com/pricing that day; both are exact. Rocket Money’s free-plan features were read from rocketmoney.com, and the Apple, Google Play and PayPal steps from each company’s own help pages, the same day. Spreadsheet amounts are illustrative examples, not prices of any real service. Time estimates are our own reasoning, not measurements.