How much do your subscriptions really cost a year? A subscription tracker that shows you

Monthly prices hide the true cost. Added up over a year, five ordinary subscriptions surprise most people. How Expense Diary tracks them and their renewals.

£10.99 does not sound like much. Neither does £7.99, or £2.99. That is the point of monthly pricing: each one is small enough to wave through.

Add them up for a year and the picture changes. Five ordinary subscriptions, a music service, two streaming services, cloud storage and one shopping membership, come to about £500 a year. Most people, asked to guess, say half that.

What a subscription tracker should tell you

Not just the list. Three things:

The yearly total, in one number, because that is the number you can compare with a holiday or a month’s rent.
The split by type, so you can see that entertainment is three quarters of it and decide whether that is what you want.
When each one renews, because the only cheap time to cancel is the week before the renewal, not the day after.

How Expense Diary does it

The Bills tab has a Subscriptions view. Add each subscription once, with its price and how often it renews, and the app keeps the rest up to date:

The Subscriptions view in Expense Diary: the yearly total, a bar by group, and each subscription with its renewal date — The yearly total at the top, the split by group, and every subscription with its next renewal and its cost a year.

The total a year at the top, with the monthly equivalent under it.
A bar splitting it by group: entertainment, software and cloud, shopping and delivery, health and fitness, and so on.
Each subscription with its next renewal date, and the yearly cost beside the monthly price so a £95-a-year membership sits fairly next to a £7.99-a-month one.

A subscription is a bill, so it also does everything a bill does. It appears on the month’s calendar, it is held back from your safe to spend figure until it is paid, and you can tick it off or let the app match it when the entry appears.

The nudge

The app notices when a subscription has not been paid for a while. That happens when a card expires, when you cancelled and forgot to tell the app, or when the company quietly stopped charging. A quiet note on the row asks whether it is still going, so the list stays honest and the yearly total stays true.

A ten-minute audit

Once the list is in, go down it with one question per row: would I sign up for this today, at this price? Not “do I use it”, which is too easy to answer yes to, but whether you would pay for it now if you did not already.

Typical findings from people who have done this:

One or two services nobody in the house has opened in months.
Two services that overlap, such as two cloud storage plans or two music services from a switch that was never finished.
Something on a monthly plan that is cheaper yearly, which is worth switching if you kept it after the question above.

Cancelling two of the five above saves around £200 a year. The app then shows the new total, which is a satisfying number to watch go down.

See it in three minutes

Try it

Expense Diary is free on Google Play, and coming to the App Store. Subscription tracking is part of the free version, with everything kept on your phone.

More about the app on its page.