I hated subscription tracking apps — until I found this h...

I hated subscription tracking apps — until I found this hidden gem

Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police | Luby

By Jon Gilbert Published 18 minutes ago Jon has been an author at Android Police since 2021. He primarily writes features and editorials covering the latest Android news, but occasionally reviews hardware and Android apps. His favorite Android device was the Pixel 2 XL, and he regards the three months when he owned an iPhone as a time of the utmost shame. Jon graduated with a History degree in 2018, but quickly realized his writing skills were better put to use writing about tech rather than essays. He started writing and editing for startups shortly after graduating, where he did everything from writing website copy to managing and editing for a group of writers. When he's not sitting at his computer, you can find him working at Warhammer World, reading sci-fi, or turning his speakers up to 11. Sign in to your Android Police account Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap

Nobody likes subscriptions, but they are a fact of life. It's difficult to use only apps and services that require one-time payments; the average American pays for 5.4 subscriptions.

But when there's a problem created by one company, you can count on the fact that another company is making a profit by providing a solution.

Apps that offer to find and cancel your subscriptions have surged, with new options appearing every year. However, as profit-driven apps, they are fraught with problems.

The biggest issue I have with most of these apps is that they themselves require a subscription to cancel other subscriptions automatically.

Rocket Money, one of the rising stars in the subscription cancellation business, costs a minimum of $6 a month for its Premium features.

These apps can be useful, but I was sick of them. I hated their bloated features, subscription plans, and overcomplicated UIs. Then I discovered Subtrack.

Subtrack has what I want from a subscription management app

A simple UI that only shows the most important information

Most subscription apps make a big deal over their automatic features.

If you haven't used one, you sign up with your email, and the app tries to find all the subscriptions associated with that email address.

Then, you can either cancel them manually or pay the subscription fee to have the app do it for you. The problem is that I don't need to regularly cancel subscriptions.

The apps keep you around with other features after you've canceled subscriptions, but I find these distracting and unhelpful. My banking app does a perfectly good job of automating savings and budgeting.

Subtrack is entirely manual. You have to enter all your subscriptions manually, including when and how they renew.

It took a little bit of work to track down all my subscriptions (more on that later), but it only took seconds to add each one to the app.

options for subscriptions in subtrack app

subscription detail form in subtrack app

After you've added all your subscriptions, the app shows them in an easy-to-read layout on the home screen.

You can view subscriptions as tiles or a list and filter them by subscription status or when they renew.

It's seriously impressive how straightforward the app is. At a glance, I can see my average expense each month, and with a tap, view it by year and week.

The only odd feature is that space-themed animation that shows your subscriptions floating around in bubbles. It's cute, but it takes up unnecessary space, so I turned it off.

Subtrack has easy-to-read insights about your spending

Understand your spending at a glance

Subtrack, like most subscription management apps, has a tool that provides insights into your spending. However, it's more limited, but I think that's a good thing.

Subtrack's Insights tab (in beta at the time of writing) shows your monthly subscription spending, how many active subscriptions you have, and the average cost of your subscriptions (the average for Americans is about $91 a month if you want to compare), and a tracker to see how much you've spent each month.

Finally, there's a list of your subscriptions sorted by how much they cost. That's it.

It's rare I can cover all an app's features in one article, but Subtrack's minimalism means I've touched on them all. And that's why I love it.

Within half an hour of downloading the app, I had all my subscriptions in an easy-to-read format.

Sure, it would have been easier to have another app automatically import them, but manually scrolling through my monthly spending forced me to directly confront my spending. Detaching oneself from daily finances is an easy way to overspend.

Subtrack makes you do the work to stay aware of where your subscriptions are, but collates it all in the easiest-to-read format I've ever seen on one of these apps.

Subtrack isn't perfect, but it's close

At the time of writing, Subtrack had an annoying bug where it thought all my renewal dates were three days earlier than they were.

This didn't technically matter as the monthly calculations were all the same, but it was an odd oversight nevertheless.

Other small bugs, like the field for entering prices not automatically adding decimal points, are irritating but not app-breaking.

Finally, let's talk about my favorite feature. If you want to add more than five subscriptions and remove ads, you will need to pay a fee.

But unlike its peers, this is a one-time purchase of $1.99; this is the first subscription management app I've used that doesn't require one to access all the features.

Subtrack won me over thanks to its intuitive Material You interface, but it's keeping me because of its payment structure.

There's definitely room for improvement, but right now, this is the only subscription management app I'll be using for the foreseeable future.

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