4.99 euros here, 9.99 there. An app tried once, a free trial never cancelled, a streaming service nobody at home watches any more. Taken one by one, these charges seem harmless. Added together, they weigh heavy.
An entrepreneur, Ben Tossell, said this week that he had handed this hunt to an AI agent. The result: around 6,000 dollars a year in subscriptions he no longer needed.
Good news: you can do the same thing at home, risk-free, in a quarter of an hour.
The method, step by step
1. Get your statements. From your bank's app or website, download your statements for the last three to six months, as PDFs or better, as spreadsheet files. Six months also lets you spot quarterly subscriptions.
2. Remove sensitive information. Before handing anything to an AI, delete your account number, your IBAN, your address. The AI only needs the labels, the dates and the amounts. You can even just copy and paste the expense lines.
3. Ask for the list. For example: "Here are my expenses for the last six months. List all the payments that recur regularly, group them by service, give their frequency and work out their cost over a year. Sort them from most expensive to least expensive."
4. Check every line yourself. An AI can get things wrong, confuse two services, or miss an obscure label. The annual cost is often the real surprise: a subscription at 12 euros a month is 144 euros a year.
5. Sort. For each subscription, three options: keep, cancel, or switch to a cheaper plan. Ask yourself honestly when you last used it.
What not to do
Never give your banking credentials to an assistant or an AI agent so it can go digging through your accounts itself. A cleaned-up statement is more than enough. If you want to go further with an agent, first read our guide to giving access without giving everything.
Also think about the tools already available: many banks now show the list of your recurring payments directly in their app.
In France, since 1 June 2023, any contract taken out online must be cancellable online, simply, via a clearly visible function, often labelled "cancel your contract". The provider can no longer force you to send a recorded letter or call a customer service line. And for contracts renewed automatically, it must warn you before the deadline so you can refuse the renewal. If a service makes things difficult for you, you can report it on the SignalConso platform.
The right habit going forward
Once the clear-out is done, note the end date of each free trial in your calendar at the moment you start it. And repeat the exercise once or twice a year. Subscriptions have an annoying tendency to grow back.
Companies, for that matter, do exactly the same exercise with their own AI tools, as shown by the giants putting their engineers on an AI diet. Nobody likes paying for what they do not use.
What to take away
Sorting out your subscriptions is a chore everyone puts off. With an AI, it becomes a matter of a few minutes.
Just keep the golden rule: the AI analyses, you decide, and your banking details stay with you.