Get honest about your subscriptions

Nobody is surprised by their rent. People are routinely surprised by the total of eleven small recurring payments they set up over three years and never revisited. Subscriptions exists to make that total visible.

A subscription is a recurring payment you expect to keep paying. That is the test. If it is a one-off, it is a transaction. If it is a promise to pay a fixed total over time, it belongs on Pledges instead.

Adding one

1. Open Subscriptions under My Finances.
2. Press Add Subscription.
3. Give it a name, an amount, and the frequency it actually charges at.

The frequencies available are Daily, Weekly, Every 2 Weeks, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly. Choose the one the provider really bills at, not the one that is easiest to think about. A yearly subscription entered as monthly will quietly overstate your commitments by twelve times, and a quarterly one entered as yearly will understate them.

Pausing beats cancelling

Four statuses are available: Active, Paused, Cancelled and Expired. Use Paused for the gym membership you have frozen for two months and Cancelled for the one you have genuinely ended. They read the same on a bank statement and mean completely different things to your future self.

Recording what you actually paid

You can record a subscription payment against the subscription itself. This is worth doing, because the schedule tells you what should have gone out and the payments tell you what did. Providers raise prices, take payments late, and occasionally take them twice. You will only notice if both sides of that comparison exist.

Unlike most of the pages in this course, subscriptions are not gated. You can add them on the free plan.