Subscription tracker in India: four places charges hide

UPI AutoPay is the rail most people know about, because the app asks for your PIN when the mandate is set up. It is created inside GPay, PhonePe, Paytm or the merchant's own app, and it is listed only in the app that created it. If you have used three UPI apps over the years, you have three lists.

Cards work under the RBI's e-mandate framework for recurring payments. You register a standing instruction with an extra authentication step, the issuer sends a notice before each charge, charges above a set limit need fresh approval, and you can withdraw the instruction. Useful protections, all of them, and none puts the list anywhere you look by habit. NACH mandates also debit your account on a schedule, but they mostly carry EMIs, premiums and SIPs rather than subscriptions.

The fourth place is not a rail but a clock. An annual plan is charged through one of the other three, once, and then vanishes from view for eleven months.

Take a couple with twelve subscriptions, none of them outrageous on its own. Nine bill monthly, three bill once a year. Here they are by place, priced per year so that monthly and annual items can be compared. The figures are illustrative; the method is to rebuild this table from your own statements.

By place, the cards carry 36.3 percent of the spend, annual renewals 24.6 percent, UPI AutoPay 23.5 percent and Google Play 15.7 percent. The UPI mandate list, the one place most people check, holds under a quarter of the money.

Start with the renewal. The productivity suite cost ₹4,899 last year and renewed at ₹6,199: ₹1,300 more, a 26.5 percent rise. As a monthly figure that is ₹517 a month, ₹108 more than before. A ₹108 rise on a monthly bill would show on the next statement. On an annual plan it arrives as one charge, preceded by an email that says 'your plan will renew' and not always what it will cost.

The delivery membership is the other version: a first-year introductory price of ₹899, renewing at the standard ₹1,499. That is ₹600 more, a 66.7 percent rise, and nobody raised any price; the discount simply ended. Between them, the two renewals went from ₹5,798 to ₹7,698, up ₹1,900 or 32.8 percent, and neither shows up in a monthly check.

Now the trial. The photo editing app offered seven free days, took a small verification charge on the card, and converted to ₹349 a month. When it is found decides what it costs.

Do it in this order, because each step catches what the one before it cannot. You need your bank statements, your card statements, your phone and your spouse's phone.

Minutes one to six: the bank statement. Download 13 months, not three. The extra ten catch every annual item, and the 13th catches one that renewed exactly a year ago. Search it for these terms one at a time: AUTOPAY, MANDATE, NACH, SI, ACH, RECURRING, RENEWAL, SUBSCRIPTION, PLAY. Descriptors differ by bank, so also scan for the same amount on the same date in consecutive months. Note each one and the date it first appeared.

Minutes seven to eleven: every card statement, including add-on cards. Look for repeating amounts, charges in a foreign currency, which usually carry a markup on top, and one-rupee or two-rupee charges, which often mark the start of a trial.

Minutes twelve to fifteen: Google Play, under the subscriptions list in your account, then the same on every other phone in the house.

Minutes sixteen to twenty: the mandate list in every UPI app you have ever used, including ones you have not opened in a year. A mandate outlives the app's place on your home screen.

Keep it if you used it in the last 30 days and would sign up again at the current price. The music plan at ₹119 a month, used daily, passes easily.

Downgrade it if you use it but a cheaper tier covers how you use it. The premium video tier at ₹499 was watched on one phone; the ₹199 tier covers that. The saving is ₹300 a month, ₹3,600 a year, with nothing given up.

Cancel it if it has gone unused for 60 days, if someone else in the house already pays for the same thing, or if the only reason to keep it is the money already spent. The fitness app at ₹399 a month with no sessions fails all three ways of looking at it.

For annual items, run the same rule a month early. Cancelling the day after a renewal usually saves nothing until next year, because most annual plans do not refund unused months.

A tracker is useful only if it sees what the audit above finds by hand.

All four places. A tool that reads one UPI app's mandate list sees 23.5 percent of this household's spend. One that reads the bank account sees card bills as totals and Play charges under the store's name.

Annual items. It needs a year of history, or it cannot know a ₹6,199 charge is a renewal and not a one-off purchase.

Price changes. It should compare each charge with the last one for the same merchant and say when they differ. That is what turns ₹4,899 into ₹6,199 from a surprise into a line on a list.

New recurring merchants. The first charge after a free trial looks like any other purchase; the second, a month later, at the same amount, is the one to flag.

Names, not handles. A UPI debit arrives with a handle and a mandate reference. Unless those are turned into a merchant name, the list is a list of codes.

Anything that never touches your accounts is invisible to every tracker, however good.

Cash. A monthly class or a gym paid in cash is a withdrawal on the statement and nothing more.

A family member's card. If a parent's card pays for a plan the whole family uses, or a spouse's Play account bills the spouse's card, it is on their statements, not yours.

Gift subscriptions. Someone else paid for the first year, so nothing appears. When the gift ends, some services ask for a card and carry on; that first charge is a new subscription wearing an old name.

Bundles. A plan included in a mobile recharge or a broadband bill has no debit of its own. Its cost is inside the bill, and cancelling it usually means changing the plan.

And sometimes a tracker is simply unnecessary. If you have three monthly plans you use every week and no annual ones, a 20-minute look once a year does the job.

The audit on this page works because it reads the bank and card records that touch all four places, and the step that takes the time is gathering them. The app does that gathering continuously. It reads your bank and card transaction emails and, on Android, your bank's transactional SMS, with each UPI handle turned into a merchant name from a database of about 10,000 entries. On Pro, its Fixed Expenses screen keeps a Subscriptions list built from those records.

What you see is close to the table the page builds by hand: one line per recurring subscription, with its amount and whether it is due or paid this month, and a detail for each showing how often it is paid, the usual payment days, how many past payments matched and the past months' payments. Setting each line against the keep, downgrade or cancel rule is yours, because only you know when you last used it.

It never asks for your bank password or UPI PIN, and every payment is one you authorise. You cancel at the merchant, then revoke the mandate in the app that created it.

Install Unyfy on Android, or use the web app at app.unyfy.co.in on an iPhone.