Made for Swiss self-employed & SMEs
Software subscriptions have a habit of multiplying. One tool here, another app there — and before long you are paying for a dozen services while only half of them earn their keep. This short routine gathers them into one calm list and keeps an eye on renewal dates for you.
Start with one honest list
Open a single document or note and write down every service you pay for: the name, the monthly or yearly price, the renewal date, and what it actually does for you. Do not aim for perfection — ten minutes spent scanning your bank statements and email receipts is enough to catch most of them.
The point of the list is not to be clever. It is to make the invisible visible. Most self-employed people are surprised to find at least one subscription they had completely forgotten about.
Feed this list to an AI tool and ask it to tidy the entries into a clean table. You can attach a bank export or paste the lines straight in. The AI is good at turning messy notes into ordered rows you can actually read.
While you are at it, note whether each service bills monthly or yearly. Yearly plans usually cost less, but they also lock you in for longer — so for those, the renewal date matters even more.
Let the AI watch the calendar
Once the list exists, renewal dates stop being a surprise. Ask the AI to sort the list by next renewal date and to flag anything that renews in the coming thirty days.
Go a step further: ask it to estimate the yearly total, to group the services by category, and to mark the ones you have not opened in months. These are clues, not verdicts — but they point you toward the subscriptions worth questioning.
Set a small reminder to repeat this check once a month. Ten minutes, once a month, is all the routine asks of you.
Decide before you renew, not after
The real value appears when a renewal email lands in your inbox. Instead of renewing on autopilot, you already know what the service costs, what it does, and whether you used it. Cancelling becomes a calm decision rather than a rushed one.
- Cancel the tools you no longer use.
- Downgrade the ones you use only now and then.
- Keep the ones that clearly earn their keep — and let the rest go.
What changes once it is running
You stop paying for tools you forgot about. You stop being surprised by a yearly charge. And you gain a quiet confidence that every franc you spend on software is a choice, not an accident.
This is one of the smallest routines you can set up, and one of the fastest to pay for itself. It needs no new software, just a little order and a monthly habit. Even one cancelled subscription can pay back the time it took to build the list many times over.
