Connect your accounts through Plaid
When you click “Connect a bank”, a secure Plaid Link window opens. Plaid is the connectivity layer used by apps like Venmo and American Express, and it talks to your bank directly — your username and password go from your browser to your bank, never to us. Where your bank supports it, you sign in on the bank's own site using OAuth, so your credentials never leave it at all.
What we receive back is a read-only access token scoped to the accounts you chose. You can connect as many banks and credit cards as you like — subscriptions often hide across several cards.
We import and monitor your transactions
Right after you connect, we import the transaction history for each account, so detection can start with real data instead of waiting for new charges to arrive.
From then on, your bank data stays fresh in three ways:
- Plaid notifies us the moment new transactions post to your account, and we sync immediately.
- Each sync is incremental — we fetch only what changed since last time, nothing is re-downloaded.
- A daily scheduled sync runs as a safety net, so nothing is missed even if a notification never arrives.
The detection engine finds your recurring charges
Bank statements are messy: the same service can show up as “NETFLIX.COM”, “Netflix 866-579-7172”, or “NFLX*STREAM”. The first thing our engine does is normalize merchant names and group your outgoing charges by the merchant behind them.
Then it looks at the rhythm of each group — the gaps between consecutive charges. Charges that repeat on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or yearly cadence are flagged as subscriptions. The matching is deliberately forgiving:
- Billing dates drift — a monthly charge that lands a few days early or late still counts.
- Prices change — a price hike or a usage-based plan won't break the pattern.
- Two charges are enough — a new subscription appears on your dashboard as soon as its second charge posts.
For every subscription we also compute what it really costs per month and per year — a $95.88 annual charge becomes $7.99 a month — and predict the date of the next charge.
Review everything in one dashboard
Your dashboard shows every detected subscription with its true monthly cost, the next expected charge, and your total recurring spend per month and per year. Recurring, spending, and budget views break the same data down by timeline and category.
If something isn't actually a subscription — say, a grocery store you just visit on a schedule — mark it as ignored and it stays out of your list. And if a merchant you cancelled ever bills you again, that subscription resurfaces automatically so the charge doesn't slip past you.
Request a cancellation — we take it from there
When you click “Cancel it”, you're not handed a phone number and wished good luck. Your request goes into our cancellation queue, where our team works each merchant's actual process — cancellation portals, support chats, emails, and yes, the occasional phone call.
You can follow every request from your dashboard:
- Requested — we've received it and it's in the queue.
- In progress — we're actively working the merchant's cancellation process.
- Needs info — the merchant requires something only you know (an account email, for example); we'll ask you for exactly what's missing.
- Completed — the subscription is cancelled, and your “saved by cancelling” total goes up.
- Failed — rare, but some merchants only allow the account holder to cancel. When that happens we tell you why and exactly what to do.
While a request is open, the subscription shows as cancel-pending — and because we keep watching your transactions, you'll know for sure the charges actually stopped.
It keeps working after day one
Subscription creep doesn't stop, so neither do we. New recurring charges appear on your dashboard as soon as they establish a pattern, upcoming charges are surfaced before they bill you, and you can disconnect any bank — or delete your account entirely — at any time.
Common questions
How quickly will I see my subscriptions?
Within minutes. The import and detection run immediately after you connect an account — most people see their full subscription list before they've finished connecting their second card.
Why isn't a subscription I know about showing up?
Detection needs at least two charges from the same merchant in the history we can see. A brand-new subscription appears once its second charge posts, and a subscription billed to an account you haven't connected can't be seen at all — connect that card and it will show up.
Do you see my bank password?
No. Credentials go directly from your browser to your bank through Plaid. We receive a read-only token, which is encrypted before it ever touches our database.
Can you really cancel anything?
We handle the overwhelming majority of merchants end-to-end. A few insist on speaking to the account holder — in those cases we tell you exactly what to say and where, so it's a two-minute task instead of an afternoon.
Is my bank supported?
Plaid connects to thousands of banks and credit unions across the US and Canada, from national names to local institutions. If you can log into it online, odds are good you can connect it.