Subscription Audit
Find every forgotten recurring charge in your inbox and bank, calculate the annual waste, and decide what to actually cancel.
Personal Lifeeasy~15m setup
- Tools
gmailmemorymemory_search- Channels
telegramdesktop- Uses
cron
Most people pay $100–500 monthly on subscriptions they've forgotten about. The trial that became permanent. The "I'll cancel next month" from 2 years ago. The duplicate cloud storage. A one-time audit recovers obvious waste; a quarterly recurring one keeps it gone.
What it does
- Scans Gmail for receipts (Stripe, App Store, Google Play, etc.)
- Identifies recurring charges by sender + frequency
- Builds a master subscription list: name, monthly cost, annual cost, last charge, sign-up date if findable
- Flags duplicates (Dropbox + Google Drive + iCloud)
- Identifies suspicious low-usage signals (no app open in 60+ days if you tell it which apps you use)
- Annual review: total spend, top categories, "cancel candidates"
What you'll need
- Gmail integration with read access
- Memory for the master list
- ~30 minutes for the initial scan
- Cron for quarterly re-audits
Setup
1. Initial scan
Send to Flowly
Run a subscription audit:
1. Search my Gmail for receipts in the last 12 months. Patterns:
- subject: "receipt", "invoice", "your subscription"
- sender domains: stripe.com, paypal.com, apple.com,
googleplay.com, plus the SaaS apps directly
- body: "monthly", "annual", "next billing date"
2. For each match, extract:
- Service name (sender domain or product name)
- Amount + currency
- Frequency (monthly / annual / quarterly — from email body)
- Last charge date
- First charge date if findable in older emails
3. Group by service. Compute total annual cost (multiply monthly by
12, etc).
4. Save to memory tagged "subscriptions:<service-slug>".
5. Send Telegram message:
📋 Subscription audit (initial)
Total: ~$XXX/month, ~$YYYY/year
Top 10 by annual cost (sorted):
- Service A — $X/mo ($Y/yr)
- ...
Possible duplicates:
- "Cloud storage" overlap: Dropbox $20/mo + Google One $10/mo + iCloud $3/mo
- "VPN" overlap: NordVPN + ExpressVPN
Send me your usage notes for any I should review more carefully.
2. Tell the agent which you actually use
Send to Flowly
For these subscriptions, here's the truth:
- Dropbox — open weekly, keep
- Google One — auto-renewed, can cancel
- iCloud — using for photos, keep at lowest tier
- NordVPN — never opened in 6 months, cancel
- ExpressVPN — using, keep
(Memory updates accordingly. The "cancel candidates" list shrinks to
verified ones.)
3. Quarterly re-audit cron
Send to Flowly
Cron "subscription-audit" every quarter (1st of Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct) at 9 AM:
1. Re-scan last 90 days of Gmail
2. Detect new subscriptions (services not in memory) — flag as
"first-charge: $X — review?"
3. Detect missing charges (services in memory with no recent charge)
— flag as "haven't been charged in 90 days, cancelled or paused?"
4. Detect price increases (current charge > 1.1x prior charge) —
flag with delta
Send Telegram digest with what changed since last audit.
Tips
- Don't auto-cancel. Even when something looks dead, double-check before pulling the plug — you might use it once a year (tax software, holiday-only services).
- Watch for proxy charges. Stripe / PayPal don't always reveal the underlying merchant. The audit will say "Stripe — $9.99" and you have to dig.
- Family plans matter. "Spotify $14.99" might be a family plan covering 4 people. Don't cancel without checking who's on it.
- Annual subs disguise themselves. A $79.99 charge once a year looks like a one-off. The agent should flag any non-trivial one-time charge from a SaaS-looking domain.
- Currency conversion. If you live abroad, USD subs and EUR subs are easy to lose track of. Have the agent normalise to your home currency.
- Set a cancel-first-pay-later rule. If usage is uncertain, cancel now — most services let you re-subscribe instantly if you actually miss it.