GhostBill

How to track your subscriptions without linking your bank

Last updated: August 2026

Almost every subscription app asks to connect to your bank first. It's a reasonable request from their side — bank access is how they find recurring charges automatically. But plenty of people would rather not, and there's nothing irrational about that.

This page explains what you're actually agreeing to, how to find every subscription yourself in about ten minutes, and what to use to keep track afterwards.

What bank linking actually grants

Most apps connect through an aggregator such as Plaid. The access is read-only — nothing can move money — but it is broad and it is ongoing: your transaction history and new transactions as they happen, for as long as the connection stays authorised.

For some people that's a fine trade for convenience. It's worth noticing what the trade is, though: you're granting continuous visibility of everything you spend, in order to solve a problem that is fundamentally counting.

Find every subscription in about ten minutes

You only have to do this once. Do it properly and you won't have to guess again.

  1. Open your card statement — don't work from memory. Memory reliably misses the small ones, and the small ones are usually the problem.
  2. Scan three months, not one. Monthly charges show up in any month, but quarterly ones won't. Three months catches most patterns.
  3. Then scan a full year for the annual ones. These hide best and are usually the largest single charges. Search your email for "receipt", "invoice" and "your subscription" over twelve months to catch what the statement doesn't make obvious.
  4. Check your app stores separately. Purchases made through Apple or Google appear on your statement as one lumped payment to Apple or Google, not as the individual service. Both have a subscriptions page listing them properly.
  5. Check PayPal separately too, if you use it — recurring PayPal payments often don't look like subscriptions on a bank statement.
  6. Write down the renewal date for each one, not just the price. Most money wasted on subscriptions isn't spent on things people hate — it's spent on things they meant to cancel and forgot.

The honest catch: a tracker that doesn't see your bank can't find anything you don't tell it about. That's the one real advantage bank-linked apps have. If you want automatic discovery, use one of them — the trade is genuinely worth it for some people. Everything below assumes you'd rather do the ten minutes.

What to use afterwards

A spreadsheet genuinely works. The point of this exercise is the counting, not the tool, and if a spreadsheet gets you there, use a spreadsheet.

What a spreadsheet won't do is tell you when something is about to renew, which is where most of the money actually leaks. That's the gap a tracker fills.

GhostBill

GhostBill is a subscription tracker that runs entirely in your browser. No account, no server, no bank connection — your data is stored in your own browser and there is nowhere else for it to go. It totals your true monthly and yearly spend, flags trials before they convert, and exports renewal reminders to your calendar so the warning arrives whether or not you have the app open.

Free for up to six subscriptions. Pro is $19 once — not a subscription — for unlimited tracking, calendar reminders, price-hike history, exports and budgets.

Start counting — free, no signup →

Works in any browser. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.

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