A bank or card statement is the ground truth for forgotten subscriptions. Email can lie: promotions, failed payments, a receipt for a plan you already canceled. The card either charged or it did not.
Get 90 days, not 30
Monthly plans show up twice in 60 days and three times in 90. Annual plans show up once, which is easy to mistake for a one-off. Download PDF or CSV from the bank or card site. Prefer the account that actually pays: some people put streaming on a credit card and software on a debit card.
What a repeating charge looks like
Same (or nearly same) amount, same descriptor, a regular gap: 28-33 days, or about 365 days. Descriptors are often ugly: PP*SPOTIFY, AMZN DIGIT, AplPay APPLE.COM/BILL. Map those to the real brand, then decide.
Ignore one-time travel, marketplaces, and food delivery unless the amount repeats. Airbnb is not a subscription. DashPass is.
PDF vs CSV in Unwanted Subscription
Upload a PDF and it is read on the server for recurring charges, then discarded. CSV stays on the iPhone and is never uploaded. You do not give the bank login. There is no open-banking scrape. You pick the file.
The scanner matches known merchants (Netflix, Spotify, gyms, VPNs, news) and still lists unknown repeaters so you can name them. Combine this with an inbox scan when the descriptor is nonsense and the receipt email is clear.
Annual plans
Adobe, news sites, and cloud storage love yearly billing. On a 90-day PDF you get one line. Search the PDF for the merchant name, then check mail for “renews on.” If you do not want another year, cancel before that date. Adobe in particular can charge an early termination fee on annual-paid-monthly plans. Read how to cancel Adobe before you tap.
When you are done, the useful artifact is not the PDF. It is a short list: keep, cancel, remind. That is the whole product.