The Breaker Times

These days, there are so many digital subscriptions out there — music, movies, fitness, cloud storage, software, podcasts, audiobooks, Patreons, security cameras, AI bots, and more — that it’s perfectly understandable if you start losing track of what exactly you’re signed up for.

To make things even more complicated, you may be paying some subscriptions monthly and others annually. Then, there are those insidious free trials: you sign up to test something out, forget all about it after a few days, and then get billed unexpectedly (this is an occupational hazard for tech journalists). And of course, both Apple and Google make it immensely easy to sign up for various services almost instantly using their account. 

Luckily, Apple and Google also offer ways to quickly check up on the apps and services you’ve signed up for. You can easily review your active subscriptions and cancel them if you want to — and you can do it on your desktop or mobile device. It’s worth doing on a regular basis to make sure you’re not signed up (and paying) for anything you don’t want. Here’s how.

(A note: it’s worth bearing in mind the Apple tax — if you sign up through the iOS App Store for something like Netflix or Spotify, Apple takes a 30 percent cut each time, which is often passed on to users. You can sometimes get these subscriptions for cheaper if you sign up on the web or a non-Apple device.)

If you’ve signed up for any digital subscriptions through the App Store, using or registered payment method, Apple keeps track of them for you. If you’re using your iPhone:

• Open the App Store and tap your profile picture (top right).
• Choose Subscriptions to see active and recently canceled subscriptions.
• Tap Sort to order the list by name, price, or renewal date.
• Select any subscription to see more details and to cancel it.

For each subscription, you’ll be shown the app it’s attached to, how much you’re paying, and how regularly you’re paying. In most cases, you just get the option to cancel, but if multiple plans are available — as with Apple One, for example — you can switch to a different plan as well as cancel.

On the same screen, you’ll also see subscriptions you’ve canceled, up to a year after the subscription has expired, and you can’t manually clear this history. If you select any of these subscriptions, you get the option to renew them again.

There’s also a Renewal Receipts toggle switch on the subscriptions page: enable this to get emailed receipts every time there’s a renewal and another payment gets taken (it can be another useful reminder of what you’re signed up to).

You can get to these subscriptions from macOS, too — everything you’ve signed up for through an Apple App Store, whether on mobile or desktop, is shown together.

• Open the Mac App Store and click your profile picture (bottom left).
• Choose Account Settings.
• Select Manage next to Subscriptions.
• Click any subscription to see details.

You get the same options as you do on iOS: you’re able to cancel subscriptions that are active or renew subscriptions that have been canceled in the last year.

To use an Android device to find subscriptions to apps and services that you’ve signed up for through your Google account, start by opening the Play Store.

• Tap your account picture (top right).
• Choose Payments and subscriptions > Subscriptions.
• Select any of the subscriptions shown to see more details about it: how much you’re paying, when the next billing date is, and the payment method being used. You can also update your payment method (for example, if you want to use a different credit card).
• To cancel a subscription, select it, then choose Cancel subscription.
• Tap Resubscribe to sign up again for a subscription you’ve previously canceled.
• Choose Remove to remove a canceled subscription from the list.

You can get to the same options on a desktop system by loading up the Play Store on the web in your browser.

• Click your account picture (top right).
• Choose Payments & subscriptions.
• Open the Subscriptions tab to see everything you’re signed up for.
• Click Resubscribe to renew a canceled subscription or Manage for anything else.

The options are the same as on mobile: you can see the billing amount, the next billing date, and the payment method being used. Click Cancel subscription to cancel.

If you didn’t sign up for any of your digital subscriptions directly through your Apple or Google account, they won’t necessarily all show up on your account. To get a fuller picture of your subscriptions, a bit more detective work may be required.

Checking bank account and credit card balances regularly is a good start — if this isn’t something you already do. Any subscriptions will be billed regularly on the same dates, and it should be clear what they are. Remember that some might be annual rather than monthly, so you really need to look at 12 months’ worth of records to be sure.

Digging into your email inbox can help, too: run a search for “subscription” and see what comes up (you might find a few newsletters you can unsubscribe from, too). If you use secondary email accounts to sign up for subscriptions, in order to avoid getting too many promotional messages, remember to check these, too.