I was doing a routine check of my bank statement when I spotted three charges I didn't recognise.
Not fraud. Just subscriptions I had completely forgotten about.
A fitness app I used twice in January. A cloud storage plan I'd upgraded during a free trial and never downgraded. A news site I'd subscribed to for one specific article.
Together: €34 a month. €408 a year. Gone.
The frustrating part wasn't the money. It was that I consider myself reasonably careful with finances. I track my grocery spending. I compare prices before buying anything over €50. But subscriptions had somehow become invisible.
The model is designed that way. A free trial ends quietly. A price increases by €2 and nobody emails you. A service you used during lockdown keeps charging because cancelling takes three steps and you never got around to it.
And unlike a one-time purchase, there's no moment of decision. The money just leaves your account, month after month, until you happen to look.
I talked to friends about this. Everyone had a version of the same story. One friend in Madrid was paying for two music streaming services simultaneously. Another in Paris had four different cloud storage plans because she kept signing up and forgetting to cancel the old one.
I started a spreadsheet. It worked for about six weeks. Then I forgot to update it when I signed up for something new, and the whole thing became useless.
I looked for apps. Most of what I found were built for the US market — prices in dollars, services I'd never heard of, no support for the European subscriptions I actually use.
The ones that did support Europe were either complicated to set up or wanted access to my bank account, which I wasn't comfortable with.
I ended up building something myself. A simple tool that lets you add subscriptions manually, see your real monthly total, and get a notification a few days before anything renews.
No bank access required. No complicated setup. Just a clean list of what you're paying for and when.
The renewal alerts turned out to be the most useful part. Getting a reminder five days before a charge means you actually have time to decide if you want to keep it — instead of seeing the charge and thinking "I should probably cancel that" for the fourth month in a row.
If you want to try it, Klaxo is free to start at klaxo.app — no credit card required, free for up to 5 subscriptions.
The €34 I found paid for a lot of dinners.
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