Why I Built Subtrac

It started with a NZ$47 charge I didn't recognise.

I was going through my credit card statement on a Sunday afternoon — something I do maybe once every two or three months, which is probably the first mistake — and there it was. NZ$47. The merchant name was a string of letters that looked like a payment processor reference, not a product name. I had no idea what it was.

After about fifteen minutes of Googling I figured out it was an annual renewal for a cloud storage service I'd signed up for during a free trial eighteen months earlier. I'd completely forgotten about it. I'd never used it after the first week. I'd been paying for it for a year and a half.

That's NZ$84 I'd handed over for nothing. And the worst part wasn't the money — it was the feeling that I had no idea what else I was paying for that I'd forgotten about.

The tools that were supposed to help

I went looking for a solution. There are plenty of subscription trackers out there. Rocket Money, Truebill, Bobby, Subtrack (yes, one letter different — annoying), PocketGuard. I tried most of them.

Every single one had the same problem: they were built for Americans.

The service catalogues were full of US-only products. The prices were in USD. When I tried to add Spark Mobile, or NEON, or Sky Sport Now, or Skinny Broadband — the services I actually pay for — they either weren't there, or I had to manually enter everything from scratch with no logo, no description, no billing cycle defaults. The apps that connected to bank accounts only worked with US banks. The ones that didn't require bank access were still clearly designed around a US subscription landscape that doesn't map to what a New Zealander, or an Australian, or a Brit actually pays for each month.

I tried Bobby for a while. It's a clean app and I respect what they've built. But it's a mobile-only experience, the service catalogue is thin for NZ, and there's no web version. I wanted something I could check on my laptop as well as my phone.

I tried building a spreadsheet. That lasted about three weeks before I stopped updating it.

The thing that actually matters

Here's what I realised: the problem isn't that people don't care about their subscriptions. It's that the friction of tracking them is just high enough that most people don't bother until something goes wrong — until there's a NZ$47 charge they don't recognise, or until they add up their streaming services and feel vaguely sick about the total.

A good subscription tracker needs to do two things well. First, it needs to know what services people in your country actually use. Not just Netflix and Spotify — those are everywhere — but the local ones. Spark. Skinny. NEON. Sky. Countdown Everyday. Stuff Premium. The services that are woven into daily New Zealand life, or Australian life, or British life, that US-built apps simply don't know exist.

Second, it needs to show you prices in your actual currency. Not USD with a note that says "your bank will convert this." NZD. AUD. GBP. The number you actually see on your statement.

Neither of those things is technically hard. They just require someone to care enough to do the work for each market.

So I built it

I had the frustration to motivate me, and I had a clear picture of what I wanted: a clean, fast, web-first subscription tracker with a proper NZ service catalogue, NZD pricing, and a design that didn't feel like it was built in 2015.

I added region support from the start — not as an afterthought. New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom each have their own service catalogues, their own default currencies, and their own set of deals and free trials. When you open Subtrac and select your region, you see the services that are actually relevant to you, priced in the currency you actually pay in.

The dashboard shows you your monthly spend at a glance. You can toggle services on and off as you subscribe and cancel. You can see which billing dates are coming up. You can find deals and free trials you might not know about. And when you see a charge on your statement you don't recognise, you can check Subtrac in thirty seconds and know exactly what it is.

What I'm still building

Subtrac is live and working, but it's not finished. The features I'm most focused on right now are billing reminders — email notifications a few days before a renewal so you can cancel if you've stopped using something — and better spend reporting so you can see trends over time, not just a snapshot of today.

I'm also expanding the service catalogues constantly. If there's a service you pay for that isn't in Subtrac yet, I want to know about it. The feedback button is real and I read every message.

The number that stuck with me

After I built the first version of Subtrac and started using it properly, I went through every subscription I was paying for. I found three I'd forgotten about. Combined, they were costing me NZ$31 a month — NZ$372 a year — for services I wasn't using.

I cancelled all three in about ten minutes.

That's what Subtrac is for. Not to make you feel guilty about the subscriptions you love and use every day. But to make the forgotten ones impossible to hide.

If you've ever had a charge on your statement you didn't recognise, or if you've ever added up your subscriptions and been surprised by the total, Subtrac is for you. It's free to start — no credit card required.