I’m looking for a way to keep track my recurring subscriptions. I just want a nice overview of recurring payments and where they come from, I don’t need a solution to actively go and manage the subscriptions for me. Unfortunately my bank, despite being a trendy digital bank, does not have a good built-in tool for this.
There’s a plethora of third party services I found for this (Truebill, TrackMySubs, Hiatus, etc.) but they require you to give them unrestricted access to your bank account activity which seems like a privacy nightmare. I’ve also found some less invasive apps, such as Subby for Android, but they’re basically just nice views over manually entered data. The ones I’ve found also seem to be single-platform only: even if you can sync your data (not always the case) you can then only view it from the app on the same platform.
Do you have a good solution for this? Something that’s a middle ground between giving your entire payment history to some random company and a good-looking local-only spreadsheet?
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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If they’re always on the same day of the month, why not a calendar or a spreadsheet? I have a personal calendar with my paydays and bills listed on it (power is due on X, renter’s insurance on Y, I get paid on B, Patreon on Z, and so forth).
If not, why not just a local-only spreadsheet? Recurring payment tracking is as good a use as any.
I wish they were all on the same day of the month…
Dates aren’t a big concern though. What I was hoping for is something that would update automatically to some extent if (say) some amounts change, or a payment is missed. But I guess indeed that’s basically impossible without access to my payment data.
Given that I have to update it manually though, I would at least like it to be synced remotely. So that I can, say, check it from my laptop on a webpage or desktop app without redoing all the manual data input.
If you don’t want to integrate your banking it sounds like you want to use a spreadsheet
I guess you’re right, yeah. I was hoping someone had figured out a different solution, perhaps integrating directly with the individual subscription providers. But I guess that’s way too broad of a scope, integrating with countless individual services.
At least a cross-platform, cloud backed “spreadsheet” would be nice to have though.
How about privacy.com?
It lets you create a virtual credit card for every subscription and the point is that you can cancel those with a single click, but it’s also said to be a good way of keeping track of the subscriptions.
I’m not American, it seems to be available in the US only…
Oh yes privacy.com, may as well sign up to google docs, they only need to collect…
Your name email address phone number birth date government-issued identification number payment card and bank information Device Data hardware model operating system Location Cookies Beacons… among others.
For my use case yes, that would defeat the purpose, but for what it’s trying to do it kinda makes sense… At least, they have to do it to comply with payment regulations. And you’re still only exposing your identity to one service with a decent reputation, rather than plenty of possibly shadier ones. It seems like a fair tradeoff if what you’re looking for is privacy from services you want to pay for.
Yeah I was being a bit facetious I admit and I agree what you said is 100%. No data is safe these days and I guess I was trying to outline the fact that signing up to privacy.com is no different than signing up to a new banking institution. It’s who and what you trust in the end and for what it’s worth, privacy.com has a great concept and it would be a great option to use if trying to avoid personalcredit card scams and fraudulent activity.
Oh yeah, you’re right on that. If I’m looking for privacy from the subscription manager signing up with a service like this is a terrible choice, because it is fully a financial institution.
https://privacy.com/privacy-policy
So lame