Technologies
4 Apps That Help Track Your Streaming Subscription Bills
Are you making payments for a streaming service you barely use? Here’s how to keep up.
Your streaming subscriptions for Netflix, Spotify, Disney Plus and other accounts are probably all on autopay. Because you don’t have to think about due dates, that may mean you’ve overlooked the monthly expense or who to contact if you want to cancel. You could be spending more money than you want by paying for a phantom streaming service.
Is Netflix billing you directly? Has your forgotten Hulu 30-day free trial turned into a paid subscription? Did you buy your Disney Plus subscription through a third party like Apple, Amazon or Verizon? With all the streaming price changes creeping in, unwatched content, and missed opportunities for deals, it’s a good idea to keep up with who’s billing you, when and for how much. Luckily, there are apps that can make keeping track of your streaming subs a lot easier.
Here’s our list of recommendations for apps that help you track payments for your streaming service subscriptions. Most of these offer a free option, but you can upgrade to a paid version if you want extra features.
Read more: Keep Up With What’s Streaming on TV Using These 5 Free Apps
Formerly known as Truebill, Rocket Money is a well-rounded budgeting app with the option to track your streaming subscriptions. There are free and paid versions available.
It uses Plaid to link your financial accounts and syncs information about automatic payments from your bank, credit card or services like PayPal. After signing up and setting up multifactor authentication, you can begin managing your recurring payments. Rocket Money provides a snapshot of your yearly spending on subscriptions like Spotify and Netflix, and you can also view upcoming payments including a countdown to the due date. A calendar icon takes you to a screen that outlines all payments for the month.
You can cancel subscriptions within the app, view your history of payments or remove them from the Rocket Money list. There is a seven-day free trial, but its recurring fee is on a sliding scale from $4 to $12 per month, billed annually. Rocket Money is easy to use, but the free account lacks some features such as having the app cancel your streaming accounts.
Hiatus is a budget- and bill-managing app that includes a subscription manager feature. When you create an account, you can track your streaming services in an organized «upcoming bills» category. The app also allows you to enter missing subscriptions manually.
Hiatus connects your financial institutions through Plaid, with options that include banks, PayPal or the Google Play Store. In addition to showing all your streaming subscriptions on autopay, the app provides insights on how much you’ve spent at different intervals — seven days, 30 days and the last 365 days. You may opt to set spending limits for your streaming services using the budget feature.
You can use the app for free, but if you sign up for a premium plan at $8 per month, Hiatus offers other features like canceling your subscriptions on your behalf. You also have the option to cancel on your own. Hiatus is available for Android, iOS and web browsers.
Like Hiatus and Rocket Money, Bobby helps you keep up with your streaming subscriptions and how much you’re spending on them. Unlike Hiatus and Rocket Money, Bobby does not require you to link your financial information to track your recurring payments.
Instead, you click through the app’s list of providers to create a list of streaming subscriptions. Then you manually enter information such as how much and how often you pay. We admit this may not be helpful if you can’t remember all of your active services. But with Bobby, you can receive notifications for upcoming due dates, organize the bills into a category and monitor your average spending on streaming. And it’s free.
Foreign currency breakdowns and security features like Touch ID and passcodes are available. Bobby can be downloaded on iOS devices only.
Trim allows you to find, track and cancel subscriptions at no charge. Like Hiatus and Rocket Money, you can connect your financial institution through Plaid, and the app will collate all your recurring subscription payments.
You can view your transaction history for each streamer and cancel a service within the app or by visiting its site directly. Trim is not available as a mobile app, but you can access it on a web browser on your phone or other device.
Streaming service bill tracker FAQs
What about privacy?
Sharing access to your financial information with a third party raises genuine concerns about security. We urge you to review the privacy policies for each service to learn how information is used and stored. With the exception of Bobby, all the services on this list use Plaid to connect your accounts. Plaid does not provide your login credentials to Rocket Money, Trim or Hiatus, so none of the apps receive or store your banking or credit card information.
Why isn’t Mint on this list?
Mint (by Intuit) is a popular user-friendly app that’s used for budgeting. There’s a feature meant to help you track bills and subscriptions, but when I clicked on the Subscriptions tab in the Bills section, none of my subscriptions or recurring payments showed up. I did receive a message saying Mint couldn’t find any subscriptions in my transaction history. Additionally, we’ve seen numerous users reporting that the subscription feature is unreliable.
Are there any other apps you considered?
In addition to Mint and the four tools on this list, we checked out other budget/subscription tracker apps, including PocketGuard, Wallet by Budgetbakers, Billbot, Petal and Everydollar. We decided to highlight the four we discussed here based on robust features, accessibility, fees and ease of use.
PocketGuard syncs with many banks but you’re unable to link PayPal and other third parties like the Google Play Store. Billbot is not available for newer versions of Android, Petal requires you to apply for an account and EveryDollar charges $13 monthly if you don’t want to manually track your financial transactions. To digitally sync Wallet with your financial institutions, you must pay for a premium account.
Technologies
You Can’t Trust Your Car’s Driving Assistance System Yet, AAA Report Finds
Both hands-on and hands-off systems required human intervention to avoid accidents in this study.
Technologies
Google’s AI Mode Is Getting New Agentic Features for Restaurant Reservations and More
AI Mode can now do most of the work to find dinner reservations for you.
Google’s AI Mode is getting new agentic capabilities and expanding to 180 new countries and territories around the world, Google announced Thursday. AI Mode allows you to ask questions directly to Google and it’ll kick off a series of searches on your behalf. From there, it will surface relevant information to your query without the need to do any of the deep research yourself. It changes the way you search for things online, and it’s getting even smarter with this latest rollout.
Powered by DeepMind’s Project Mariner, the latest additions bring us further into the agentic AI future we’ve been promised for some time, directly from a search box. Instead of just finding things for you, AI Mode can now do things for you, like finding dinner reservations, flights or concert tickets. The update also brings personalized recommendations and link-sharing capabilities for easier collaboration with friends and family.
Most of the new features are either limited to premium AI subscribers and tucked behind an experiment in Google Labs, but it might not take long before they’re a standard part of your future search experience.
Google did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for further comment.
Restaurant recommendations
Instead of searching for restaurant reservations and then clicking on a specific website to make a reservation, AI Mode surfaces everything you need to complete the action right there. Since it’s contextually aware, you can add specificities to your query that a typical Google search wouldn’t handle well.
You can add the type of cuisine, number of people, time and location to a single query, and AI Mode will get to work and display real-time restaurant reservation time slots to choose from.
Google says it’s partnered with OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster and several other companies to make finding and doing what you want easier, since you won’t have to put in the legwork yourself.
This feature is currently rolling out to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US who have enabled the specific experiment in Labs.
Personalized recommendations
Another experiment that’s currently available in the US (that also needs to be enabled in Labs) is personalized recommendations. Google says it’s starting with dining-related recommendations, which implies more options will be on the way in the future.
The experiment will use your past conversations with AI Mode, places you’ve interacted with on Search and Maps to provide suggestions tailored specifically to you.
Share AI Mode links with others for collaboration
If you’re planning a vacation or a party, you can now share your research directly with others with a new link-sharing feature built into AI Mode. People who interact with the link will be sent to the last response sent by AI Mode and can continue the conversation on their own to do more exploration on the topic. The original sender of the links can manage them and delete them at any time.
For more, don’t miss everything Google announced at its Pixel 10 event.
Technologies
IPhone or Android, Here’s How to Finally Escape That Endless Group Chat
Done with a group chat? Here’s how to ghost it on any service.
One reason people prefer group chats in Apple’s iMessage or RCS texting is the extra control and security these platforms provide. If everyone in your group is using iPhones, or if you’re on Android chatting through RCS, you’ll get features like typing indicators, high-quality media sharing, and the option to mute or leave a conversation when you need fewer notifications.
The biggest advantage is privacy. Both iMessage and RCS group chats offer end-to-end encryption, so your conversations stay secure. The only time that doesn’t apply is when a thread includes a mix of iPhone and Android users, which limits encryption support.
Knowing these differences can help you manage your chats more effectively, whether you’re keeping up with friends, planning events, or just looking for a little more control over your notifications.
And with RCS support with iOS 18, group chats that include a mix of iPhone and Android participants have more features than ever — but it’s not at the level you’ll experience when a conversation is fully on iMessage or Google Messages. «Green bubble chats» from an iPhone to an Android phone can now include typing indicators, higher-quality media and easier group chats.
However, RCS conversations between the iPhone and Android phones don’t include encryption now, but it should be added in a future update. This will hopefully give these conversations a similar level of privacy that we expect when using chat services like iMessage, WhatsApp or Signal.
Regardless of how you’re in a group chat with others, you can leave a chat. Here are the steps to leave any conversation from your phone’s texting app, regardless of whether it’s happening on iMessage, RCS or as a mixed MMS chat.
Leaving group chats on an iPhone
You can leave group conversations on your iPhone in two ways. You can either mute a chat,which keeps you in a conversation but you no longer receive notifications about it, or you can outright leave and no longer have access to the chat.
On an iPhone, open Messages and go to the chat thread you want to leave. At the top of the screen are conversation controls, a group of icons with the participants. Tap this to open a pop-up menu. As long as your conversation has four or more participants, iOS gives you the ability to tap Leave this Conversation with red text. If your chat has three or fewer participants, though, the option is grayed out, but you can tap Hide Alerts to prevent the conversation from notifying you further. Tapping Hide Alerts also allows you to mute a conversation, letting you keep access to a chat without necessarily leaving it. These steps apply to both iMessage conversations and to those over RCS.
Hide and block MMS chats on an iPhone
Although you can’t officially leave MMS group chats, you can hide or block the conversation. It’s not as good as outright leaving a conversation (other participants will still see you as in it), but you at least have no personal evidence of the conversation continuing.
On an iPhone, visit the group chat and tap the conversation controls. Instead of seeing Leave this conversation, you will see the option to Delete and Block this conversation. If you’d rather just mute the conversation instead of deleting and blocking it, you can hit Hide Alerts to mute it.
Leave group chats on an Android phone
On an Android phone using Google Messages, visit the chat thread you want to leave. Tap the conversation’s name to bring up the Group Details menu. Within this menu is the Leave Group button. Unlike with iMessage, you can leave chats with as few as three participants.
If you want to just mute notifications, tap Notifications on the Group Details screen to bring up a window with notifications controls. This includes options to make the conversation stay Silent to prevent it from ringing your chat, and if you tap Lock Screen, a pop-up menu will give you the option to prevent notifications. Tap Don’t show notifications at all to enable.
Hide and block MMS chats on an Android phone
On an Android phone with Google Messages, follow the same steps to access options for controlling notifications. This includes visiting the MMS chat thread and then tapping either the name of the conversation or the names of the participants at the top to bring up the Group Details menu. You won’t see a Leave Group option like you did with an RCS thread, but you do get the same ability to tap Notifications to access controls for hiding the conversation. This includes the same options for turning the conversation to Silent and to select Don’t show notifications at all.
SMS vs. MMS vs. RCS
SMS stands for Short Message Service and debuted in 1992. Text messages are limited to 160 characters. MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service and supports sending photos, videos or other files and messages longer than 160 characters. MMS supports a group of people chatting in a single conversation thread, while SMS can text multiple people at once but is sent as individual messages to each person. RCS, which launched 15 years ago, is short for Rich Communication Services and can show typing indicators, read receipts and has end-to-end encryption.
While cross-platform chat apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram have better controls for conversations, encryption and privacy, regardless of the type of phone participants are using, they don’t support SMS, MMS or RCS. That’s why the default messaging app on most phones is still widely used, even if it means that a group chat is on a less feature-filled, unsecured standard like MMS.
