Nobody budgets for the annual renewal of a thing they used twice in March. It arrives, it is charged, and the moment to have done something about it was a week earlier.
Why these are different from everything else you track
A tub of yoghurt that expires costs you the yoghurt. A subscription that renews costs you a year, and then keeps costing until you do something. The reminder has to land before the date, with enough room to act, because afterwards you are asking for a refund rather than making a choice.
They are also the only category here where the other party would quietly prefer you did not remember.
The ones that catch people
- Free trials that convert to paid, especially long ones where the end is far enough away to forget
- Annual plans, where you made the decision eleven months ago in a completely different context
- Introductory pricing that steps up at renewal without the service changing
- Insurance auto-renewal, which frequently renews above the price a new customer is quoted
- Memberships — gyms, clubs, warehouse stores
- Domains and hosting, renewing on multi-year cycles you have entirely forgotten
- Software bought for one project
What to record
Enough to make the decision when the reminder arrives, without going and looking things up:
- What it is, and what it actually does for you
- The renewal date
- What it costs, and whether that is about to change
- Where to cancel — the specific place, because that friction is what makes people give up
The "where to cancel" note is the one that earns its keep. Knowing a renewal is coming is useless if acting on it means twenty minutes of hunting for an account page.
A one-off hour that pays for itself
Pull up the last two or three months of bank or card statements and read the recurring lines. On an iPhone, check your Apple subscriptions in Settings as well, since those do not always look like what you expect on a statement. Add what you find, once. It is tedious exactly once, and most people turn up at least one thing they had stopped using.
How Timely handles it
Add a renewal by scanning a confirmation email or invoice, speaking it, or typing it. Set the reminder a few days ahead — long enough to cancel without rushing, short enough that you still remember deciding. Everything sits in the same timeline as the rest of your dates, so the renewal you need to handle on Thursday shows up next to everything else happening on Thursday.
Common questions
Does Timely connect to my bank or cancel subscriptions for me?
No to both, and that is deliberate. Timely does not link to your bank, read your statements, or have any ability to cancel anything. It is a reminder that reaches you before the charge, with the information you need to act. You stay the one who decides and the one who clicks cancel.
How do I catch a free trial before it converts?
Add it the moment you sign up, with the renewal date rather than the sign-up date, and set the reminder two or three days early. Trials are usually cancellable right up to the end while still running for the full period, so an early reminder costs you nothing and buys you the decision.
What about subscriptions I have forgotten about entirely?
An app cannot find those for you if it cannot see your statements. The one-off job is worth doing by hand: go through a recent bank or card statement, and on iPhone check Settings for your Apple subscriptions. Add whatever turns up once, and the reminders handle it from then on.
Track it before it catches you out
Timely is free on the App Store. Scan a label, a receipt or a document and it remembers the date for you.
Download on theApp Store