Barnacle
Last updated: 16 August 2026
There is no single list. Your subscriptions are split across Apple, Google, PayPal, whichever cards you have used, and a handful of companies that bill you directly. Each holds a piece and none of them holds the whole thing. Working through the six places below takes about twenty minutes and it is the only way to see the full picture without handing your bank login to a third party.
Do them in this order. The first two are quick and catch the most.
Open Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. Everything bought inside an iPhone or iPad app is here, including things you cancelled, which show an expiry date instead of a cancel button. On a computer, the same list is at apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions.
In the Play Store app, tap your profile icon, then Payments and subscriptions, then Subscriptions. Worth checking even if you switched to iPhone years ago, because an old Android subscription keeps billing the card on the Google account, not the phone.
Log in on the web, open Settings, then Payments, then Automatic payments. This is the one people skip and it is where the oldest charges live. Anything you signed up for before 2018 has a decent chance of sitting here.
Pull the last three months of statements for every card, including the one you barely
use. Three months matters because monthly charges appear three times and are easy to
spot, while an annual renewal only shows up once a year. If your bank lets you search
transactions, the useful searches are the merchant names you already suspect, plus terms
like renewal, membership, premium and
plus.
Watch for charges that do not name the service. Payment processors often appear under their own name rather than the company you signed up with, so a line reading a processor name and an amount is worth searching for before you dismiss it.
Search your inbox, including archived and deleted mail, for these:
"your subscription""receipt from""your free trial""payment successful""we've renewed"Sort by oldest first. Recent receipts tell you what you already know, and the useful finds are the sign-up confirmations from two years ago for services still charging you.
Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and most large services take payment themselves rather than through Apple or Google, even when you use their app on an iPhone. If a service is not in any list above and you are sure you pay for it, log in to its own website and look under account or billing.
The hardest case is a line on the statement, an amount, and no idea which account it belongs to or which of your email addresses signed up for it. Work through these in order. The first two are free and usually enough.
Read the descriptor exactly as written. Search the full string in
quotes, punctuation included. Descriptors are often the payment processor plus a
truncated product name, so a line like PADDLE.NET* MYAPP or
PAYPRO*RENEWAL tells you the processor first. Searching the processor name
alone brings up its own charge-lookup page, and several of them let you enter the amount,
the date and the last four digits to see what the charge was for.
Ask your bank who the merchant is. Card networks require merchants to register a customer service name, phone number and website, and your bank can read you all three. This is a normal request and the phone agents handle it daily. It converts an unreadable descriptor into a company you recognise.
Try a password reset for each address you own. Once you know the company, go to its login page and run the forgotten-password flow against every email address you have ever used. The response tells you whether an account exists on that address without needing the password. This is the fastest way to answer "which of my four emails did I sign up with", and it works even when the account is under an address you stopped checking years ago.
Search your email for the amount, not the company. If the sign-up confirmation used a name you no longer associate with the service, the number is the thing that stayed constant. Search for the exact figure, including the currency symbol, across all mail rather than the inbox alone.
Contact the company with the charge details. Give them the date, the exact amount and the last four digits of the card. Their support can find the transaction and tell you which account it sits under. Expect them to verify that the card is yours before they say anything, and that is the correct behaviour on their part rather than obstruction.
If nothing identifies it, dispute it. Your bank's dispute process forces the merchant to produce evidence of what you bought and under which account, and it stops the billing while that happens. Use this when the trail runs out, not as the first move, because a dispute against a service you do want back is more work to undo than to cancel normally.
Apple and Google only report subscriptions bought inside their own stores, and neither exposes an API letting a third-party app read that list. Every tracker advertising automatic detection gets there by reading your bank transactions through an aggregator, which means handing over your banking credentials and your full transaction history, not the subscription lines. That is a real trade rather than a free feature, and it is worth understanding what those apps get out of it.
I built Barnacle after doing exactly this exercise and finding four things I had forgotten. You type each subscription in once, and it adds them into one monthly total and warns you before the next charge lands. It runs entirely on the phone, with no account, no sign-in and no servers, so the list you just spent twenty minutes building stays yours.