Track a subscription so it can't roll over to full price without warning you

Subscription businesses optimize for the moment you forget. The $0 trial that auto-renews into $99/yr. The “$0 for 12 months” that becomes $45/yr on month 13. The annual membership that renews exactly when you stopped using it. GlidePath tracks every subscription with a promo end date and surfaces it on the action queue 30 days before the rollover — long enough to decide whether to cancel, downgrade, or accept the new price intentionally. This walks you through tracking your first one.

What you’ll learn

Where the Subscriptions tracker lives in the app
How to enter a promo-pricing subscription (with start/end dates and price flip)
How to enter a free trial that auto-converts to paid
How to read the urgency states
How the warnings show up on the dashboard and the Calendar

Before you start

You don’t need anything prepared. Have a recent statement handy if you want exact dollar amounts, but you can put approximate numbers in now and refine them later. Worst case: you save a few dollars on a subscription you would have forgotten anyway.

One prerequisite that isn’t obvious: you need to be out of Explore mode. Trying to save a real subscription from the demo sandbox sends you to /Activate and writes nothing — the demo data is a sandbox that gets wiped, so the app declines to put your real records in it.

Three subscription types worth tracking

GlidePath’s tracker is designed for the kinds of subscriptions that feel like one-time decisions but turn into recurring charges:

Annual memberships with auto-renewal. Walmart+, Amazon Prime, Costco, Sam’s Club, DoorDash DashPass, Uber One. They bill once a year, often when you’d forgotten you signed up.
News intro pricing. NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, The Atlantic. The intro is $1-5/mo, the rollover is $20-30/mo — a 5-10× jump that’s easy to miss because the new charge looks similar to the old one until you notice the size.
Free trials that auto-convert. HelloFresh, Adobe trials, AppleCare, password managers, anti-virus. “Free trial” almost always means “cancel within X days or we charge you.”

This is what the tracker is for. Netflix and Spotify aren’t the problem — everyone knows those are subscriptions. The expensive misses are the ones that don’t feel like subscriptions.

Step 1 — Open the Subscriptions page (30 sec)

In the desktop app, open Subscriptions in the top nav (it’s under Money).

If this is your first time, you’ll see three starter cards — Annual membership, News intro pricing, and Free trial that auto-converts. Each pre-fills the Add form so you edit and save rather than typing from scratch.

Two things about them that will save you a confused minute:

The card body isn’t clickable. The pre-fill is on the button inside each card — Use Walmart+ as a starter →, Use NYT as a starter →, Use HelloFresh as a starter →.
The cards disappear once you have one active subscription. They’re a first-run affordance, not a permanent menu. If you want to use more than one, do it before saving — otherwise just fill the Add form directly, which is all the buttons do anyway.

Step 2 — Track an annual membership (2 min)

Click Use Walmart+ as a starter →. The Add form on the right pre-fills with Walmart+ as an example. Edit it to match your real subscription:

Merchant — replace “Walmart+” with your actual merchant (Costco, Sam’s Club, etc.)
Category — leave as “Membership” or change to anything that helps you organize
Billing cycle — Annual
Start date — the day you signed up
Post-promo price — the amount you’ll be charged annually. For most annual memberships, this is the price right from day one.
Promo end date — for a standard annual membership without intro pricing, this is the same as one year from start date

Click Track this subscription. It appears in the Active table — to the left of the form on a normal window, stacking above it only on a narrow screen.

Step 3 — Track a free trial that auto-converts (2 min)

Now the trickier case: a free trial that auto-converts to paid.

The starter cards are gone at this point — saving in Step 2 retired them — so fill the Add form directly. The HelloFresh example the card would have loaded is: Merchant HelloFresh, Category Auto-ship, Billing cycle Monthly, Promo price 0, Post-promo price 60.

The fields that matter for trial-to-paid:

Start date — the day the trial begins
Promo end date — the last day of the trial
Promo price — type 0 for a genuinely free trial, or the discounted intro amount if you’re paying something. Type it explicitly rather than leaving the field empty: blank means “I haven’t recorded this”, and the app will show full price rather than assume you’re paying nothing. (For a plain annual membership with no intro deal, in Step 2, the honest entry is the same number as the post-promo price — you’re paying full freight from day one.)
Post-promo price — what you’ll be charged after the trial ends
Cancel-by date — set this a few days before the trial ends. This is the date GlidePath will warn you about. Most trials let you cancel any time during the trial; setting cancel-by a few days before gives you a buffer.

Click Track this subscription. You’ll see two rows in the Active table now.

Step 4 — Where the warning actually appears (1 min)

The thing you set this up for doesn’t live in the table. When something needs you, an orange panel appears above it: Coming up — review before you get charged, with a line like “Rolls over in 12 days · Jun 3” or “Cancel by May 29 (4 days left)”, and two buttons — Cancel it and Keep — I reviewed.

That panel is the feature. Cancel-by dates surface there from 30 days out, so there’s room to act rather than react.

Step 5 — Read the Status column (1 min)

The Active table has a Status column, and it’s plain text rather than a colour code — it tells you which of five situations a row is in, and each phrasing is deliberate:

Free trial · converts date — the promo price is recorded as exactly $0. This is the case this page exists for
Promo · ends date — a real discounted promo: you’re paying something, just less than full price
Promo ends date · promo price not recorded, showing full price — you set a promo end date but never entered what you pay during it. The app won’t guess, so the price column shows full price rather than inventing a discount. Fill in the promo price to clear it
Full price (promo ended date) — the promo has already run out; you’re paying the post-promo amount now
Full price · since date — no promo was ever involved

A subscription you mark Cancelled (or Watched) leaves the Active table entirely and moves to the Cancelled / watched section further down the page, so the Active list stays a list of things actually costing you money.

The timing warnings live elsewhere, not in this column: the Calendar page (a unified view of bills, BT cliffs, subscription rollovers, and tax deadlines) and the dashboard’s action queue, which is where a cancel-by or promo-end date coming up gets surfaced.

Step 6 — See it on the dashboard (30 sec)

Open the /Index dashboard. What shows there depends on how close the date is, and it’s worth knowing so you don’t go looking for the wrong thing:

Inside 7 days — the subscription gets its own row with an Open → link straight to it on /Subscriptions. At most a couple of these render at once.
8 to 30 days out — it’s real but not urgent, so it’s parked. The dashboard collapses everything in that band into a single line reading “N items parked for later”, linking to /Actions, not /Subscriptions. Your subscription is in there; it just doesn’t get its own headline yet.

This is the part few tools do. Simplifi and Monarch detect subscriptions after the first charge — they see “huh, here’s a recurring $45 from Walmart, must be a subscription” and tell you about it once it’s already cost you. GlidePath surfaces the warning before the first surprise charge.

What just happened

You’ve now built a tripwire:

Tracked the dates that the bank doesn’t surface — the promo end date, the cancel-by date, the rollover amount
Set up automatic warnings on /Calendar and on the dashboard action queue
Got a single page to review every recurring subscription in one place

The next time a rollover is coming up, you’ll see it in your action queue 30 days out, not as a surprise charge on your card statement.

Common follow-ups

I don’t know my exact cancel-by date

Most trials say it explicitly in the signup confirmation email — search your inbox for the merchant name. If you genuinely can’t find it, set Cancel-by to 2 days before your Promo end date as a buffer. GlidePath will warn you in time either way.

My subscription is monthly, not annual or trial — should I track it?

Up to you. If it’s a steady $15/mo Spotify subscription with no promo, there’s nothing for the tracker to surface — you already know what it costs and when it bills. Tracker is for subscriptions where a price flip or cancel-by date is hiding.

Can the app detect recurring charges from my transactions?

Yes — the “We found these recurring charges in your transactions” table on /Subscriptions shows payees with 3+ similar charges across 2+ months. Each row has a Track this → button that pre-fills the Add form with the merchant + price. Easy way to find subscriptions you forgot you had.

The row’s Status flips to Full price (promo ended date) — plain text, not a coloured pill — and the Now column starts showing the post-promo amount instead of the promo one.

The action queue carries the row from 30 days before the date until three days past it, then that window closes on its own whether or not you acted — the warning is a window, not a nag. Cancel it and Keep — I reviewed are how you close it out early. Note there’s no “Reviewed” status: a subscription is only ever Active, Watched, or Cancelled.

Can I track subscriptions for the whole household?

Yes, but as one shared list — a subscription has no per-person owner field, and this page has no per-partner filter. Everything you track counts toward the same Paying right now and At full price totals. To record who a subscription is for, put it in the Notes field — that’s what its placeholder is suggesting with “for kids, work-only”.

Ask Glide about this

Try: “How does the subscription rollover detection work?” — Glide will explain the dates, pace, and warning thresholds. Glide doesn’t see your subscriptions; it just explains the mechanism.

Where to next

Track a balance transfer end-to-end — same pattern, applied to debt
Categorize a month — for the broader monthly-money review ritual