Apr 14, 2025·8 min
Build a Mobile App to Manage Subscriptions Across Services
Learn how to plan and build a mobile app that tracks subscriptions across services, handles reminders, integrates data sources, and protects user privacy.
Learn how to plan and build a mobile app that tracks subscriptions across services, handles reminders, integrates data sources, and protects user privacy.
Most people don’t have “a subscriptions list.” They have fragments scattered everywhere: a streaming service billed to one card, a gym membership billed to another, an App Store subscription tied to a different account, and a handful of free trials buried in old emails. The result is predictable: duplicate subscriptions, forgotten renewals, and charges that feel like surprises.
A subscription management app earns its value when it can pull the picture together from multiple sources—not just a single bank feed.
“Across services” typically includes:
Each source fills gaps the others miss. A bank feed shows what was paid, but not always the plan details. Emails reveal renewal dates and pricing changes, but only if the user used that inbox and the sender format is recognizable.
Users aren’t looking for another spreadsheet. They want:
A good “first win” is letting someone answer, in under a minute: What am I paying for every month, and what renews next?
Be transparent about what the app can and cannot automate.
That honesty builds trust and reduces support issues later.
A subscription management app is only “simple” when it’s simple for a specific person. Before features, define who you’re building for and what they’ll open the app to do in the first 30 seconds.
Students often juggle streaming, music, cloud storage, and app trials on tight budgets. They need quick answers: “What renews this week?” and “How do I stop a free trial before it charges?”
Families typically share multiple services and forget who pays for what. They want clarity: “Which subscriptions are duplicated across family members?” and “Can we consolidate plans?”
Freelancers accumulate tools over time (design apps, hosting, invoicing, AI tools). They care about categorizing spending and spotting price increases that quietly raise monthly costs.
Small teams face even more sprawl: multiple seats, add-ons, and annual renewals. Their main use case is accountability and control: “Who owns this subscription?” and “What happens if the card expires?”
Your use cases should directly map to the annoyances people already feel:
Finance-adjacent apps must feel welcoming. Prioritize:
Choose iOS first if your early audience is more likely to use paid subscriptions, Apple Pay, and the Apple subscription ecosystem (App Store subscriptions), and if you want a tightly controlled set of devices for faster QA.
Choose Android first if you’re targeting wider device coverage, price-sensitive markets, or users who commonly pay through cards and carrier billing.
Either way, write down the “primary user” in one sentence (e.g., “a freelancer who wants to stop paying for tools they no longer use”). It will guide every product decision that follows.
An MVP for a subscription management app should answer one question quickly: “What am I paying for, and when does it renew?” If the first session feels busy or complicated, users won’t stick around—especially for a product that touches finances.
Start with a feature set that’s easy to understand and fast to complete:
This MVP works even without integrations. It also gives you clean baseline data for later automation.
These features can be powerful, but they introduce complexity, edge cases, or third-party dependencies:
Use a simple 2×2: ship items that are high impact / low effort first (e.g., a fast add flow, better reminder defaults). Delay high effort / uncertain impact items (e.g., shared plans across multiple households) until you see clear demand.
Write metrics that reflect real user wins:
If you can’t measure it easily, it’s not a priority yet.
A subscription management app succeeds or fails on whether it can represent reality. Your model needs to be simple enough to work with, but flexible enough for messy billing patterns.
At minimum, model four distinct things:
A subscription can change payment methods over time, so avoid baking the payment source into the subscription record permanently.
This separation also helps when one merchant has multiple subscriptions (e.g., two different Google services) or one subscription has multiple charges (taxes, add-ons).
Some edge cases are common, not rare:
Define status carefully. A practical set is active, canceled, and unknown:
Let users override status, and keep a small audit trail (“user set to canceled on…”) to prevent confusion.
Store monetary values as amount + currency code (e.g., 9.99 + USD). Store timestamps in UTC and display in the user’s local time zone—because “renews on the 1st” can shift when users travel or when daylight savings changes.
Subscription discovery is the “input problem”: if you miss items, users won’t trust the totals; if setup is painful, they won’t finish onboarding. Most successful apps combine multiple methods so users can start quickly and improve accuracy over time.
Manual entry is the simplest and most transparent: users type the service, price, billing cycle, and renewal date. It’s accurate (because the user confirms it) and works for any provider—but setup takes time, and users may not remember all details.
Receipt scanning (camera OCR of invoices or app store receipts) is fast and feels magical, but accuracy depends on lighting, document layout, and language. It also requires ongoing tuning as receipt formats change.
Email parsing looks for signals like “receipt,” “renewal,” or “trial ending,” then extracts merchant/amount/date. It can be powerful, but it’s sensitive to provider template updates and raises privacy concerns. You’ll need clear permission prompts and an easy “disconnect” option.
Bank feeds (recurring payments inferred from card/bank transactions) are great for catching subscriptions the user forgot. Tradeoffs: messy merchant names, misclassification (memberships vs. one-off purchases), and added compliance/support load from bank connectivity.
Use a “suggested match + confirm” flow:
Be specific in onboarding and privacy messaging:
Clarity here reduces support tickets and prevents broken expectations.
Integrations are where a subscription management app becomes genuinely useful—or frustrating. Aim for an approach that works for most users without forcing them to connect everything on day one.
Start with a few clear “inputs” that feed the same internal pipeline:
No matter the source, normalize data into one format (date, merchant, amount, currency, description, account), then run categorization.
A practical starting point is a rules engine that can evolve into something more advanced later:
Make categorization explainable. When a charge is labeled as a subscription, show the “why” (matched merchant alias + recurring interval).
Users will correct mistakes; turn that into better matches:
Integration vendors can change pricing or coverage. Reduce risk by abstracting integrations behind your own interface (e.g., IntegrationProvider.fetchTransactions()), storing raw source payloads for reprocessing, and keeping categorization rules independent of any single data provider.
A subscription management app succeeds when users can answer one question in seconds: “What’s my next charge, and can I change it?” UX should optimize for fast scanning, few taps, and zero guessing.
Start with four core screens that feel familiar and cover most journeys:
In lists and cards, show the essentials at a glance:
Keep these three elements consistent across every screen so users learn the pattern once.
People open this app to act, not browse. Put quick actions on the subscription detail (and optionally as swipe actions in the list):
Keep onboarding light: start with manual entry in under a minute (name, amount, renewal date). After users see value, offer optional connections/imports as a “level up,” not a requirement.
Notifications are the difference between an app people open occasionally and one they genuinely rely on. Reminders only work when they feel timely, relevant, and under the user’s control.
Start with a small set that maps to real “save me money/time” moments:
Keep notification content consistent: service name, date, amount, and a clear action (open details, mark as canceled, snooze).
People disable notifications when they feel spammed or surprised. Build controls that are simple and visible:
A useful pattern: default to helpful settings, then offer a clear “Customize” entry point from the reminders UI.
For an MVP, push + in-app is usually enough: push drives timely action, while in-app gives users a history they can review.
Add email only if you have a clear reason (e.g., users who don’t allow push, or a monthly summary). If you include email, keep it opt-in and separate from critical alerts.
Use sensible batching so you’re not creating noise:
The goal is simple: reminders should feel like a personal assistant—not a marketing channel.
A subscription management app quickly becomes “finance-adjacent,” even if you never move money. Users will only connect accounts if they understand what you collect, how it’s protected, and how they can opt out.
Depending on how you discover subscriptions (email scanning, bank connections, receipts, manual entry), you may handle:
Treat all of the above as sensitive. Even “just merchant names” can reveal health, dating, or political affiliations.
Data minimization: collect only what you need to deliver the core value (e.g., renewal date and amount), not full messages or full transaction feeds if summaries suffice.
User consent: make every connector explicit. If you offer email-based discovery, it should be opt-in with a clear explanation of what you read and what you store.
Clear permissions: avoid vague prompts like “access your email.” Explain scope: “We look for receipts from known subscription merchants to find recurring charges.”
Focus on the basics done well:
If you’re using third-party data providers, document what they store vs. what you store—users often assume you control the whole chain.
Make privacy a product feature, not a legal footnote:
A helpful pattern: show a preview of what the app will save (merchant, price, renewal date) before connecting a data source.
For related decisions, align your notification strategy with trust as well (see /blog/reminders-and-notifications-users-wont-disable).
Architecture is simply “where data lives and how it moves.” For a subscription management app, the biggest early decision is local-first vs. cloud sync.
Local-first means the app stores subscriptions on the phone by default. It loads fast, works offline, and feels private. The trade-off is that switching phones or using multiple devices requires extra setup (export, backup, or optional account sync).
Cloud sync means data is stored on your servers and mirrored to the phone. Multi-device support is easier, and shared rules/categorization are simpler to update. The trade-off is higher complexity (accounts, security, outages) and more user trust hurdles.
A practical middle ground is local-first with optional sign-in for sync/backup. Users can try the app immediately, then opt in later.
If your main constraint is speed, a platform like Koder.ai can help you go from product spec to a working subscription tracker quickly—without locking you into a no-code ceiling. Because Koder.ai is a vibe-coding platform built around a chat interface and an agent-based LLM workflow, teams can iterate on the core loop (add subscription → renewal calendar → reminders) in days, then refine it with real user feedback.
Koder.ai is especially relevant for this kind of app because it aligns well with common stacks:
When you need more control, Koder.ai supports source code export, plus deployment/hosting, custom domains, snapshots, and rollback—useful when you’re tuning notification logic or categorization rules and want safe releases. Pricing spans free, pro, business, and enterprise, and if you share what you learn, there’s also an earn credits program (and referrals) that can offset early development costs.
If you support sync, define “what wins” when edits happen on two devices. Common options:
Design the app to be usable offline: queue changes locally, sync later, and retry safely with idempotent requests (so a flaky network doesn’t create duplicates).
Aim for instant open by reading from the local database first, then refreshing in the background. Minimize battery use by batching network calls, avoiding constant polling, and using OS background scheduling. Cache common screens (upcoming renewals, monthly total) so users don’t wait for calculations every time.
A subscription management app only earns trust when it’s consistently right. Your testing plan should focus on accuracy (dates, totals, categories), reliability (imports and syncing), and edge cases that show up in real billing systems.
Write down pass/fail rules before you test. Examples:
Recurring payments are full of tricky calendar math. Build automated tests for:
Keep a repeatable checklist for:
Testing doesn’t stop at launch. Add monitoring for:
Treat every support ticket as a new test case so accuracy steadily improves.
Launching a subscription management app isn’t a single event—it’s a controlled rollout where you learn what people actually do (and where they get stuck), then tighten the experience week by week.
Start with a small alpha group (10–50 people) who will tolerate rough edges and give detailed feedback. Look for users with many subscriptions and different billing habits (monthly, annual, trials, family plans).
Next, run a closed beta (a few hundred to a few thousand). This is where you validate reliability at scale: notification delivery, subscription detection accuracy, and performance on older devices. Keep a simple in-app feedback button and respond quickly—speed builds trust.
Only then move to a public release, when you’re confident the core loop works: add subscriptions → get reminders → avoid unwanted renewals.
Your screenshots should communicate the promise in seconds:
Use real UI, not marketing-heavy graphics. If you have a paywall, make sure it’s consistent with what the store listing implies.
Add lightweight help where it matters: a short tutorial tip the first time someone adds a subscription, an FAQ that answers “Why didn’t it detect X?”, and a clear support path (email or form). Link it from Settings and onboarding.
Track a few post-launch metrics that map to real value:
Use these to prioritize iterations: remove friction, improve detection, and tune reminders so they feel helpful—not noisy.
It means building a single, trustworthy view of subscriptions by combining multiple inputs:
Relying on only one source usually leaves gaps or creates false assumptions.
A bank feed shows what was charged, but often misses the context users need to act:
Use bank data for discovery, then confirm details with receipts or user input.
Your MVP should answer one question fast: “What am I paying for, and when does it renew?”
A practical minimum set:
You can add automation later without breaking the core loop.
Model four separate objects so you can handle real-world billing:
This separation helps with bundles, add-ons, multiple plans per merchant, and payment changes.
Support common “not actually rare” scenarios early:
If the model can’t represent these, users won’t trust totals or reminders.
Set expectations clearly: most cancellations can’t be automated reliably across merchants.
Instead, provide:
This approach is honest and reduces support issues.
A safe pattern is “suggested match + confirm”:
This balances automation with accuracy and builds user trust over time.
Start simple with explainable rules, then refine:
When you label something, show why it matched so users can verify quickly.
Use notification types that map to real “save me money” moments:
Give visible controls: timing (1/3/7 days), quiet hours, per-subscription toggles, and snooze. If it feels spammy, users will disable everything.
Plan for this upfront:
Without this, renewals can shift when users travel, and totals can become misleading.