How to find every subscription you're paying for

The subscriptions you remember aren't the problem. The ones that cost you are the ones you signed up for on a phone two years ago, the trial that quietly converted, the plan a family member started on your card. They don't announce themselves. They just bill.

The good news is that every one of them leaves a trace somewhere you already have access to. You don't need to connect your bank to anything to find them. You need three searches and a list.

1. Your inbox, searched properly

Almost every paid service emails a receipt, and almost nobody reads them. In Gmail, paste this into the search box:

subject:(receipt OR invoice OR renewal OR "your subscription") newer_than:1y

Then try the same search with "trial", "renews" and "payment" in the subject. Outlook and Apple Mail have the same search operators under slightly different names; searching the subject line for "receipt" alone gets you most of the way.

Go through the results once and write down four things for each service: the name, the amount, the date, and whether it bills monthly or yearly. Don't decide anything yet. You're building a list, not a verdict.

2. The app stores

Anything you subscribed to inside an iPhone or Android app is billed by Apple or Google, not by the app, and the receipt comes from them. These are the ones people miss most often, because the email says "Apple" rather than the name of the thing you're paying for.

On an iPhone: Settings, tap your name at the top, then Subscriptions. It lists active ones and, below them, expired ones. On Android: open the Play Store, tap your profile picture, then Payments & subscriptions, then Subscriptions.

Add anything there to your list. Note that cancelling an app-store subscription happens on these screens, not inside the app itself; deleting the app does nothing to the billing.

3. Your statements, as a spreadsheet

Your bank or card app can export the last few months as a CSV file. Three months is enough to catch monthly plans; a year catches the annual ones that bill once and vanish from memory.

Open the file and sort it by description. Recurring charges land on roughly the same day each month with the same name. Look for the ones you don't recognise, and for the ones hiding behind a processor: a line that starts with PAYPAL or GOOGLE or APPLE.COM is a subscription paid through them, and you'll need to look inside that account to see which.

For PayPal: Settings, then Payments, then Automatic payments. For Amazon: Your Account, then Memberships & Subscriptions. Both pages list everything set to renew.

4. The ones you don't pay for yourself

If you share a card, a phone plan or a household, ask. A surprising number of "mystery" charges turn out to be a partner's streaming service or a child's game. They belong on the same list, with a name next to them.

What to do with the list

Now you have the full picture, probably for the first time. Three things are worth doing while it's in front of you:

1. Write the next renewal date next to each one, and put the big ones in your calendar a week ahead.
2. Mark anything you haven't opened in three months. That's your cancel list.
3. For each cancel, use a guide rather than hunting through settings. Zeno's cancellation guides cover 509 services, each with the direct link to that service's cancellation page.

A note on apps that ask for your bank login

Plenty of apps offer to do this search for you if you connect your bank account through a data aggregator. That works, and for some people it's the right trade. But it means giving a third party ongoing read access to your transactions, and it's worth knowing that the method above produces the same list from things you already hold.

That's the way Zeno works: it reads the receipts in an inbox you connect and the statement files you import, on your phone, and only when you tap scan. No bank login required.