Subscription audit

Subscription Audit

Re-read a year of statements the way no human bothers to.

Overview

Subscriptions are engineered to be invisible. Each charge is small, they land on different days, the merchant name is ADOBE *CREATIVE CLOUD 800-833 instead of "Adobe", and nobody sits down to re-read twelve months of a bank statement by hand. So the free trial that started charging, the gym you stopped going to, the app you used once — they just keep billing.

subscription_audit.py is the re-reader. Feed it a CSV you exported from your bank or card and it:

• finds the recurring charges by clustering repeat payments to the same merchant at a regular cadence (weekly / monthly / quarterly / yearly), while ignoring one-off spending like groceries, gas, or a flight;
• normalizes messy merchant names (AMZN Mktp US*RT4G9 → amazon, store numbers and auth codes stripped) so the same service groups together;
• reports the true cost — monthly and annualized — across everything it found;
• flags review candidates: a subscription whose expected next charge is well overdue (STALE), or one whose first non-zero charge was substantially smaller than later charges (trial→paid).

No bank login, no Plaid, no cloud. It reads a file you already have, is pure standard library, and is deterministic — the same statement always gives the same answer. A ruler for your recurring spend, not a budgeting app.

When to use

• The monthly "where does it go?" question. Export a statement, run the tool, see the whole subscription stack ranked by cost in one screen.
• A cancellation sweep. The STALE and trial→paid flags are your cut list — the tool even totals what cancelling the stale ones saves per year.
• A budget guardrail on a schedule. Run it monthly with --budget N; it exits non-zero when detected recurring spend creeps past your line, so a cron job or CI step can ping you when subscription creep sets in.

Not for: categorizing one-off spending, forecasting, or replacing a real budgeting app. It answers exactly one question — what am I paying for on repeat?

The method

1. Export a statement. From your bank or card, download transactions as CSV (any date range; the more months, the better the cadence detection). Most exports have a date, a description/merchant, and an amount column — the tool sniffs these by header name or by content, so you usually need no flags.
2. Run it.

   python scripts/subscription_audit.py statement.csv
   # or pipe it:  cat card.csv | python scripts/subscription_audit.py -
   

3. Read the stack. Subscriptions are listed heaviest-first with their monthly cost, per-charge amount, cadence, and last-seen date. The footer gives the total monthly and yearly burn.
4. Review the flags. ⚠ STALE means no charge appears within the configured interval; trial→paid means the first non-zero charge was smaller than later charges. The summary estimates the yearly cost of the stale entries. Confirm each charge with the provider before cancelling it.
5. Put it on a leash. Add --budget 80 to fail (exit 1) when recurring spend passes $80/mo, and drop that into a monthly cron so creep gets caught early.

Useful flags: --json (machine-readable, for a cron/agent to consume), --min-charges N (how many hits before a merchant counts as recurring; default 3), --stale-days N (grace period past the expected next charge before flagging), --currency € (display symbol).

Anti-patterns

• Feeding it two months and expecting miracles. Cadence detection needs at least three hits of a merchant. A short statement will under-report — export a longer range.
• Trusting STALE as "already cancelled". Stale means no recent charge in this file — it might be an annual plan that just isn't due, or a charge outside your export window. It's a prompt to check, not proof it's dead.
• Treating the monthly total as your whole budget. This is recurring spend only; it deliberately ignores groceries, gas, and one-offs. It's not a full budget.
• Cancelling on the merchant string alone. github and github sponsors may be two different things collapsed by name normalization — glance at the example description before you cancel.

Example

$ python scripts/subscription_audit.py statement.csv --budget 100 --stale-days 20
Subscription audit
======================================================================
  monthly      each  cadence    last          merchant
----------------------------------------------------------------------
$  54.99  $ 54.99  monthly    2026-06-15    adobe creative cloud
$  15.49  $ 15.49  monthly    2026-06-03    netflix
$  10.99  $ 10.99  monthly    2026-07-05    spotify usa ny
$  10.00  $ 10.00  monthly    2026-03-28    planet fitness  ⚠ STALE
$   4.00  $  4.00  monthly    2026-04-18    github  ⚠ STALE
----------------------------------------------------------------------
$  95.47  monthly across 5 subscriptions  (≈ $1,146/yr)

⚠ 2 look forgotten (no charge in a while): cutting them saves $14.00/mo (≈ $168/yr).
    · planet fitness — last seen 2026-03-28 (99d ago), $10.00/mo
    · github — last seen 2026-04-18 (78d ago), $4.00/mo

budget $100.00/mo  →  OK ($95.47 detected)

Groceries, gas, a flight, and an Amazon order in the same statement were correctly ignored — only the things that recur on a rhythm were surfaced.