A subscription audit is one repeatable pass over everything you pay for, ending in three decisions per line: keep it, downgrade it, or cancel it. Done properly it takes under an hour and routinely frees up a meaningful chunk of a monthly budget. Here's the full checklist — copy it, work top to bottom, and you won't miss the charges that hide.
You'll need a year of records, not just last month — annual plans bill once and slip past a monthly glance. Open these in tabs so you can cross-check: bank and card statements, app-store subscriptions, PayPal automatic payments, and your email receipts. Have somewhere to write each one down with its amount and billing date.
Check each of these sources; the leak is almost always in the one people skip.
receipt, renewal, and your subscription to catch anything the statements missed.For each line, make one of three calls. A useful test is cost-per-use: divide the monthly price by how many times you actually used it this month. A high number is a candidate to cut or downgrade.
| Decision | Applies when | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | You use it regularly and it earns its price. | Consider switching to annual billing if it's cheaper. |
| Downgrade | You use it, but a cheaper tier or smaller plan would do. | Move to the lower tier; pocket the difference. |
| Cancel | Unused 60–90 days, a forgotten trial, or a duplicate. | Cancel at the source and save the confirmation. |
Add your subscriptions to SubScan and it becomes your audit sheet: it totals your true monthly and yearly spend, flags the idle ones by how long since you used them, and holds each renewal date so the cuts are obvious. It runs entirely in your browser: no bank login, no account, nothing uploaded.
Open the free trackerQuarterly is a sensible baseline for most people, and monthly is better if your budget is tight or you use a lot of app-based services. New free trials and small add-ons accumulate quietly between checks, so a quick repeatable pass every few months keeps the total from drifting back up after your first cleanup.
Cancelling is one decision; an audit is a complete pass that ends in three decisions per line — keep, downgrade, or cancel. The audit catches the charges you'd never have remembered to cancel, surfaces tiers you can downgrade rather than drop, and leaves you with a record so the next round is faster. That's why it tends to free up more than ad-hoc cancelling.
Usually in three places: annual plans that only bill once a year and slip past a monthly statement check, app-store subscriptions that don't show a clear name on the card line, and PayPal or wallet billing agreements. Reviewing a full twelve months and checking app-store and PayPal directly is what catches them.
No. You can run the whole checklist with your statements and a notes app or spreadsheet. SubScan simply makes it faster by doing the totals and flagging idle charges for you — and it never asks for a bank or card login. You enter the subscriptions yourself and everything stays on your device.
It varies widely by household, but published 2026 examples of single audits have surfaced well over a hundred dollars a month in cuts. Your own figure depends entirely on what you're carrying; the only way to know is to list everything and total just the lines you mark downgrade or cancel.
For informational purposes only. SubScan is a free, on-device tool and does not provide financial advice. Savings figures are illustrative, drawn from 2026 third-party estimates, and vary by source and household; your own results may differ. Service and platform names are referenced only to describe general steps.