Subscription Tracker

About the Subscription Tracker

Subscriptions are designed to be forgettable, which is exactly why they add up. A few dollars here and a yearly renewal there rarely register individually, but together they can quietly claim a meaningful slice of your budget. This tracker lists every recurring service alongside its price and billing cycle, then normalises everything to a common footing so you can see your true monthly and annual subscription spend at a single glance instead of scattered across a dozen statements.

The key move is converting mixed billing cycles into comparable numbers. A 15.99 monthly streaming plan and a 139 annual membership look nothing alike on a bank statement, but per month they are directly comparable once the yearly figure is divided across twelve months. By putting both a monthly and a yearly column next to every service, the tool exposes which subscriptions are quietly the most expensive, which is often not the one you would guess.

Seeing the combined annual figure is usually the wake-up call. Individually cheap services can sum to a surprising yearly total, and that single number is what prompts people to cancel what they no longer use.

How the Subscription Tracker works

Each row has a name, an amount, and a billing cycle set to Monthly or Yearly. To make services comparable, the tool converts every entry to a monthly equivalent: yearly subscriptions are divided by 12, while monthly ones are used as-is. It displays that monthly figure and a yearly figure, which is the monthly equivalent multiplied by 12, for each line.

The totals at the bottom sum the monthly equivalents of all rows into total monthly spend, and multiply that by 12 to get total yearly spend. This normalisation is why a yearly membership contributes its fair per-month share to the monthly total rather than distorting the month it happens to bill in. Editing any amount or switching a cycle instantly reflows both the per-row and the grand totals.

Because everything is reduced to a monthly rate first, the monthly and yearly totals are always perfectly consistent with each other by construction.

Worked example

The default list holds six services. Four bill monthly: Netflix at 15.99, Spotify at 11.99, a gym membership at 39.99, and iCloud storage at 2.99. Two bill yearly: Amazon Prime at 139 and Adobe Creative Cloud at 599.88. The yearly ones are converted to monthly, so Prime becomes 11.58 a month and Adobe becomes 49.99 a month.

Adding the monthly equivalents, the total monthly spend is about 132.53 dollars, and multiplying by 12 gives a total yearly spend of roughly 1,590.40 dollars. The eye-opener is that Adobe, hidden as a single annual charge, is actually the most expensive line at nearly 50 dollars a month, well above the 39.99 gym and the 15.99 Netflix plan. Normalising cycles is what surfaces that, since on a raw statement Adobe only appears once a year.

Tips & common mistakes

• Set the billing cycle correctly for each row. A yearly charge left marked Monthly overstates your totals twelvefold and makes the whole picture wrong.
• Compare services using the monthly-equivalent column, because a large annual charge can outrank several monthly ones you assume are your biggest costs.
• Audit the yearly total quarterly and cancel anything you have not used in the last month; the annual figure is what makes idle subscriptions feel real.
• Watch for free trials that convert to paid plans. Add them to the list the day you sign up so a forgotten trial does not become a silent yearly charge.
• When a monthly service offers an annual plan at a discount, enter both ways and compare the monthly equivalents before committing, since the savings only pay off if you keep it all year.

Subscription Tracker: frequently asked questions