A subscription tracker for India, in rupees

Why subscriptions are easy to forget

A subscription is a decision you make once and then pay for repeatedly without deciding again. In India the payment is often set up as a UPI AutoPay or a card mandate. You approve it one time, and after that the charge simply arrives. Nothing on your phone asks whether you still want it.

Add a free trial that rolled into a paid plan, a family plan you share the cost of, and an app you stopped opening in March, and a small monthly amount can hide a surprisingly large yearly one. The first step is just seeing the list.

How Trove builds the list

Trove does not need access to your bank to find subscriptions. It works from the transactions you have already recorded or imported.

1. Detection. Each night Trove looks at the last 90 days of your payments. A merchant charged at least three times at steady intervals is flagged as recurring and given a cadence: weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly.
2. A renewal date. From the gap between charges, Trove estimates when the next one is due, so you can see what is coming before it lands.
3. Adding by hand. For anything detection cannot see, such as an annual plan or a membership you paid in cash, add it with the merchant, the amount, the cadence and the next renewal date.
4. Confirming. When a renewal date passes, Trove asks whether the charge happened, and moves the cycle forward when you confirm.

What the list tells you

• What each subscription costs per cycle, in rupees.
• The next renewal date, so a large annual charge is not a surprise.
• What the lot adds up to over a year. A ₹649 monthly plan is a number you can live with; ₹7,788 a year is a number worth a second look.
• Which ones you have marked as paused or cancelled, kept apart from the live ones.

Because the list comes from your own ledger, it also catches the ones you would not think to list: the storage upgrade a family member set up, the domain renewal, the app bought through a store account.

A quarterly subscription audit

You do not need a system. Four steps, four times a year, are enough.

1. Open the list and sort mentally by amount. The top three are where savings are.
2. For each one, ask: did I use it in the last month? If you have to think, the answer is probably no.
3. Cancel what you do not use, in the service itself or with your bank. Then mark it cancelled in Trove so you can check that the charge actually stops next cycle.
4. Look at what repeats that is not a subscription. SIPs and EMIs also leave on a schedule. They are commitments rather than costs to cut, but seeing them together shows how much of next month is already spoken for.

What Trove does not do

It does not cancel subscriptions, negotiate prices or contact the services you pay. It does not know that a plan has price-hiked unless the charge in your ledger changes. And it only knows what is in your ledger, so the list is as complete as your records. Keep the habit of importing a monthly statement and it stays current: see the expense tracker for India for how importing works.

If many of your recurring charges go out over UPI, the UPI expense tracker page explains how Trove keeps that spending visible. To see what subscriptions are doing to the bigger picture, look at your net worth over time. The features page covers budgets and goals, and pricing says what Trove itself costs: nothing during testing.