Your streaming subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify, Disney Plus and other accounts are probably all on autopay. Because you don’t have to think about due dates, it could mean you’ve overlooked the monthly expense or who to contact if you want to cancel. You can spend more money than you want by paying for a phantom streaming service.
Does Netflix bill you directly? Has your forgotten Hulu 30-day free trial turned into a paid subscription? Did you purchase your Disney Plus subscription through a third party like Apple, Amazon or Verizon? With all the streaming price changes creeping in, unattended content and missed deals, it’s a good idea to keep track of who’s billing you, when and how much. Fortunately, there are apps that can make keeping track of your streaming subs much easier.
Here’s our list of recommendations for apps that help you track payments for your streaming service subscriptions. Most of these offer a free option, but you can upgrade to a paid version if you want extra features.
Read more: Stay up to date with what’s streaming on TV using these 5 free apps
Formerly known as Truebill, Rocket Money is a well-rounded budget app with the ability to track your streaming subscriptions. There are free and paid versions available.
It uses Plaid to link your financial accounts and syncs information about automatic payments from your bank, credit card or services like PayPal. After signing up and setting up multi-factor authentication, you can start managing your recurring payments. Rocket Money provides a snapshot of your annual spending on subscriptions like Spotify and Netflix, and you can also see upcoming payments including a countdown to the due date. A calendar icon will take you to a screen showing all payments for the month.
You can cancel subscriptions in the app, view your payment history or remove them from the Rocket Money list. There is a seven-day free trial, but its recurring fee is on a sliding scale from $4 to $12 per month. month, invoiced annually. Rocket Money is easy to use, but the free account lacks some features, such as having the app cancel your streaming accounts.
Hiatus is a budget and bill management app that includes a subscription manager feature. When you create an account, you can track your streaming services in an organized “upcoming bills” category. The app also allows you to enter missing subscriptions manually.
Hiatus connects your financial institutions through Plaid with options that include banks, PayPal or the Google Play Store. As well as showing all your autopay streaming subscriptions, the app provides insight into how much you’ve spent at different intervals – seven days, 30 days and the last 365 days. You can choose to set usage limits for your streaming services using the budget feature.
You can use the app for free, but if you sign up for a premium plan at $8 per month, Hiatus offers other features such as canceling your subscriptions on your behalf. You also have the option to cancel yourself. Hiatus is available for Android, iOS and web browsers.
Like Hiatus and Rocket Money, Bobby helps you keep track of your streaming subscriptions and how much you spend on them. Unlike Hiatus and Rocket Money, Bobby doesn’t require you to link your financial information to track your recurring payments.
Instead, you click through the app’s list of providers to create a list of streaming subscriptions. You then manually enter information such as how much and how often you pay. We admit that this might not be helpful if you can’t remember all your active services. But with Bobby you can receive notifications about upcoming due dates, organize bills into a category and monitor your average streaming usage. And it’s free.
Foreign currency splitting and security features like Touch ID and passwords are available. Bobby can only be downloaded on iOS devices.
Trim allows you to find, track and cancel subscriptions at no charge. Like Hiatus and Rocket Money, you can connect your financial institution through Plaid and the app collects all your recurring subscription payments.
You can view your transaction history for each streamer and cancel a service in the app or by visiting its website directly. Trim is not available as a mobile app, but you can access it in a web browser on your phone or other device.
Streaming Service Bill Tracking FAQ
Sharing access to your financial information with a third party raises real security concerns. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of each service to learn how information is used and stored. With the exception of Bobby, all of the services on this list use Plaid to connect your accounts. Plaid does not provide your login information to Rocket Money, Trim, or Hiatus, so neither app receives or stores your bank or credit card information.
Why isn’t Mint on this list?
Mint (from Intuit) is a popular easy-to-use app used for budgeting. There is a feature meant to help you track bills and subscriptions, but when I clicked on the Subscriptions tab in the Bills section, none of my subscriptions or recurring payments showed up. I received a message that Mint could not find any subscriptions in my transaction history. Additionally, we’ve seen several users report that the subscription feature is unreliable.
Are there other apps you considered?
In addition to Mint and the four tools on this list, we checked out other budget/subscription tracking apps, including PocketGuard, Wallet by Budgetbakers, Billbot, Petal, and Everydollar. We decided to highlight the four we discussed here based on robust features, availability, fees, and ease of use.
PocketGuard syncs with many banks, but you can’t link PayPal and other third parties like the Google Play Store. Billbot isn’t available for newer versions of Android, Petal requires you to apply for an account, and EveryDollar charges $13 monthly if you don’t want to track your financial transactions manually. To sync Wallet digitally with your financial institutions, you must pay for a premium account.
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