Free Subscription Tracker: Monthly and Yearly Subscription List, Subscription Audit with Cost per Use, and a Business SaaS Software Tracker (PDF, Word, Excel)

What is on the page

Billing cycle and bills per year

Weekly (52), monthly (12), quarterly (4) or yearly (1). Excel turns any cycle into a monthly and a yearly cost so every subscription can be compared.

Renews

The billing day for monthly plans and the renewal date for annual ones. Put annual renewals in your calendar a week ahead.

Paid with

Which card or account, by its nickname or the last few digits only. It makes canceling and updating cards much quicker.

Cost per use

On the audit, the monthly cost divided by how many times you used it. Anything over a few dollars a use deserves a second look.

Seats, owner and notice

On the business sheet, seats paid against seats used, who owns the tool, and how much notice the contract needs before renewal.

Find every subscription

The hard part is finding them all. Go through the last two or three months of bank and credit card statements and highlight anything that repeats. Then check the subscription pages in the Apple App Store (Settings, your name, Subscriptions) and Google Play (Payments and subscriptions), PayPal's automatic payments, and search your email for "receipt", "renewal" and "your subscription". Annual subscriptions are the ones people miss, because they appear only once a year; a full year of statements catches them. Write each one on the list with the billing cycle, and Excel shows the monthly and yearly cost. In the sample, eleven subscriptions come to about $4,400 a year, more than half of it from a weekly meal kit.

Audit: cost per use

Once a year, or whenever money is tight, write down how often you actually used each subscription in the last month. Cost per use makes the decision obvious: streaming used twenty times costs under a dollar a use, while an app opened once costs its whole fee for that one use. For each one choose keep, downgrade (a cheaper plan, an ad-supported tier, a family plan shared with others), pause, or cancel. Many streaming services can be canceled and restarted when a show you want is on. Total the savings and move them straight into savings or a debt payment, or they tend to disappear.

Price increases and free trials

Subscription prices rise regularly, often with only an email to warn you. When you review the list, compare the amount billed with last time. For free trials, write the trial end date on the list the day you sign up and set a reminder two days before. A useful habit is to use a single card for all subscriptions, so one statement shows everything. In the US, the FTC has pushed for "click to cancel" rules that make canceling as easy as signing up; if a company makes canceling difficult, your card issuer may be able to help stop the charges.

Software subscriptions for small businesses

For a business, SaaS costs creep up through seats: tools bought for a project and never canceled, licenses for people who left, two tools doing the same job. The business tracker lists each tool with an owner who is responsible for it, seats paid and seats actually used, the cost per seat, the renewal date and the cancellation notice the contract requires. In the sample, eleven unused seats across four tools are worth about $1,900 a year. Review it at least twice a year and when anyone leaves; removing a leaver's seats belongs on the offboarding checklist. Record who has admin access too, so the company never gets locked out of its own accounts. Track the hardware side on the IT asset inventory.

Editing the files

The Excel and ODS versions convert any billing cycle into monthly and yearly cost, total the list, work out cost per use and yearly savings, and total seats and costs on the business sheet. The PDFs are fillable. Never write full card numbers or passwords on the tracker; use the password hint tracker for login hints.

Questions

How do I find all my subscriptions?

Check two or three months of bank and card statements (a full year for annual ones), the subscription pages in the Apple and Google app stores, PayPal automatic payments, and your email for receipts and renewal notices.

How do I work out the yearly cost of a subscription?

Multiply the amount billed by the number of bills a year: 12 for monthly, 52 for weekly, 4 for quarterly, 1 for yearly. The Excel tracker does this for every line.

What is cost per use?

The monthly cost divided by the number of times you used the service that month. It shows which subscriptions are worth keeping.

How should a business track software subscriptions?

List each tool with an owner, plan, seats paid and used, cost per seat, renewal date, notice period and admins, and review it at least twice a year and whenever someone leaves.

Is it safe to write card details on the tracker?

Write only the card nickname or last four digits, never the full number, and never passwords.