Barnacle

How to cancel an App Store subscription

Last updated: 16 August 2026

Every subscription bought inside an iPhone or iPad app is cancelled from one place, regardless of which app sold it. Deleting the app does not cancel it, and emailing the company does not either. Apple owns the billing relationship, so Apple is where you stop it.

On iPhone or iPad

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap your name at the top.
3. Tap Subscriptions.
4. Tap the subscription you want to end.
5. Tap Cancel Subscription, then confirm.

If you see no Cancel button, the subscription is already cancelled and shows an expiry date instead. If the subscription is missing from the list entirely, it was not bought through Apple. Check the section on that below.

On a Mac

1. Open the App Store.
2. Click your name at the bottom of the sidebar.
3. Click Account Settings and sign in.
4. Scroll to Subscriptions and click Manage.
5. Click Edit next to the subscription, then Cancel Subscription.

In a browser, from any device

Go to apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions and sign in with the Apple Account that pays for it. The same cancel option appears there, which is the fastest route if the phone is not in front of you.

What happens after you cancel

You keep access until the end of the period you already paid for. Cancelling on day three of a monthly subscription does not end it on day three, and it does not refund the month. The renewal is what stops.

For a free trial, cancel at least 24 hours before the trial ends. Apple processes the renewal in the final day of the trial, so a cancellation on the last afternoon often lands after the charge has already gone through.

Getting a refund

Cancelling and refunding are separate requests. For a charge you did not intend, go to reportaproblem.apple.com, sign in, find the charge, and choose the reason. Apple decides case by case, and a forgotten renewal is refunded more often than people expect, particularly the first time you ask.

Subscriptions that are not in that list

Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and most large services bill you directly rather than through Apple, even when you use their iPhone app. Those are cancelled on the company's own website, and several of them make the cancel page hard to find on purpose. Search for the service name plus "cancel" and use the result on the company's own domain.

Anything you signed up for on a website, through PayPal, or on an Android phone also sits outside Apple's list. Here is how to find every subscription you are paying for, including the ones no single list shows you.

Keeping track after the cancellation

The reason forgotten subscriptions keep happening is that the charge is small and the reminder never comes. I built Barnacle for that: it holds every subscription you pay for, adds them into one monthly total, and warns you before the next charge lands. It stores everything on your phone, with no account and no servers, and its detail screen links straight to the cancel page for the services it knows.

Barnacle on the App Store