Subscriptions are designed to be forgotten. You sign up for a free trial, it converts, the charge is small enough that it never stings, and a year later you are paying for three OTT services you do not watch, an app you used once, and a gym you stopped going to. For most people in India this quietly adds up to a few thousand rupees a year of pure leak.
Here is how to find every one of them.
1. Read your bank and card statement, line by line
Pull the last three months. Look for the same merchant charging the same amount on roughly the same date each month. Recurring, identical, monthly is the signature of a subscription. Three months is enough to catch monthly ones; pull a full year to catch the annual renewals that are easiest to forget.
2. Check your UPI autopay mandates
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is where most Indian subscriptions actually live. Open your UPI app (Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm), find the Autopay or Mandates section, and you will see every recurring mandate you have approved. Cancelling the app is not enough — you often have to revoke the mandate here to actually stop the money.
3. Search your email for receipts
Every subscription emails you. Search your inbox for terms like “receipt”, “your subscription”, “payment successful”, “auto-renew”, and “invoice”. This catches the ones billed to a card that do not show an obvious merchant name on your statement.
4. Cancel, and revoke the mandate
For anything you have not used in 60 days, cancel it. Critically, cancel in two places: inside the service, andthe underlying UPI mandate or card standing instruction. Otherwise the charge keeps coming even though you “cancelled.”
Let it find them for you
Foliom reads the payment emails you already get, lists every recurring charge, and flags the dormant ones you forgot about. See it on sample data — including a subscription that has gone quiet but is still billing.
Find my hidden subscriptionsThe faster way: let your inbox do it
The manual method works, but it is a chore you will do once and never again. The reason it is hard is the same reason it can be automated: every recurring charge already sends you an email. A bank debit alert, a card receipt, a “your plan renews” notice.
Foliom reads those emails (read-only) and does the work for you: it groups recurring charges into a clean list of subscriptions, shows what each one costs you per year, and flags the ones that look dormant — the gym you stopped using, the trial that converted. Instead of an annual spreadsheet chore, it is a list that stays current. Your email content is never stored, and access is read-only.
Do this once a quarter
New subscriptions creep in constantly. Whether you do it by hand or let a tool surface them, review your recurring charges once a quarter. It is the single highest-return ten minutes in personal finance: pure savings, no lifestyle change required.