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.

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 for the three common types above. Each one pre-fills the Add form with shape-of-data so you can edit and save rather than entering from scratch.

You can click a starter card to pre-fill, or scroll directly to the Add form on the right.

Step 2 — Track an annual membership (2 min)

Click the Annual membership starter card. 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. You’ll see it appear in the Active table above.

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

Now the trickier case: a free trial that auto-converts to paid. Click the Free trial that auto-converts starter card. The form pre-fills with HelloFresh as an example.

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 — $0 (or whatever the discounted intro is)
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 — Read the urgency states (1 min)

Each row in the Active table shows a status pill on the right:

Active — promo is running, you have time
Active · Cancel-by approaching — within 7 days of your Cancel-by date (orange pill)
Promo ended — full price is now active (red pill)
Cancelled — you marked it cancelled; the row archives but stays for reference

The same urgency is surfaced on the Calendar page (a unified view of bills, BT cliffs, subscription rollovers, and tax deadlines) and on the dashboard’s action queue.

Step 5 — See it on the dashboard (30 sec)

Open the /Index dashboard. Within the next 30 days, if any tracked subscription has a Cancel-by or Promo End date approaching, you’ll see a row in the action queue with a direct link back to /Subscriptions.

This is the part few tools do. Mint, 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.

GlidePath flips the row’s urgency to Promo ended (red pill) and updates the dashboard action queue. Your /Index dashboard will surface the rollover until you mark the subscription as either Cancelled or Reviewed.

Can I track subscriptions for the whole household?

Yes — each subscription row has an owner field. Set it to a household member from /Partners. Per-partner views on /Subscriptions filter to just that person’s subscriptions.

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
See your dashboard from your phone — check your action queue from anywhere
Categorize a month — for the broader monthly-money review ritual