Stop the financial bleed! How Orbit fights back against the dreaded ‘Subscription Creep’
It seems like all of life is becoming one big subscription party. There’s Netflix, Spotify, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Food Order Subscriptions, Duolingo, Amazon, and YouTube. Can you believe there is even a subscription to buy socks? Look, the list could go on and on, but I don’t want to bore you or me.
Subscription services are here to stay, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. As much as we hate that they drain our money every month, if we want the goods we have to accept that in return we have to part with our hard-earned money.
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This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
Orbit is a beautifully designed subscription tracking app designed to solve the growing problem of subscription creep. It acts as a financial watchdog that uncovers all the bills draining your account and centralizes them in one sleek interface. This virtually eliminates the stress of surprise fees and helps you regain control of your portfolio.
Adding subscriptions was easier than I thought
I expected to have to add each individual subscription manually, and while this functionality is present in the app, there is actually a much smarter way to load all your subscriptions into Orbit.
It’s called Magic Import and it simplifies the tedious task of manual entry by capturing financial information directly from screenshots, bank statements, CSV files or PDFs.
This is made possible by a mix of AI and very clever OCR (optical character recognition), and I have to say, it’s really, really good. I downloaded a number of different files and found Orbit reliably recovered what I needed.
In the very odd case where Orbit misinterprets specific subscription details, it’s pretty easy to dive into that particular subscription and adjust a number of data fields, including its billing cycle, which list you want it in, and whether it’s a free trial or not. These changes can be made when importing a subscription or later if you spot an error.
Track Subscriptions Like a Pro
The main home screen lets you see your subscriptions in list form, but the calendar view tells you when the money will actually leave your pocket. This helps you spot important payment days or times of the month when multiple subscriptions are grouped together. Armed with this type of information, you can plan ahead to ensure you have money set aside in your bank account.
The calendar view also includes information on the total cost of subscriptions throughout the month, as well as a live countdown of how much you still need to account for before the end of the month. I process information visually and have found the calendar invaluable for tracking my own personal subscriptions.
There are also notifications that act as a proactive defense and are designed to bridge the gap between knowing you have a subscription and taking action before you’re charged. This is perhaps most critical when adding a service marked as trial. Orbit will calculate the expiration date and send you a notification, usually 24-48 hours, before the trial period ends.
It will also send you renewal reminders for recurring bills. This is incredibly useful for cash flow management, especially for services that cost a lot of money. No one likes to be surprised by a sudden, large financial deduction, and notification reminders minimize the chances of that happening.
Go premium for a complete experience
So, if you’ve ever subscribed to a service only to realize that after several months you no longer use the service but are still paying for it, Orbit is designed especially for you. It’s for people who are anxious about piling up bills and want a simple, one-app solution to manage it all.
The free version is extremely limited, so I recommend paying the $24.99 / £24.99 lifetime fee to access the full range of premium features. These include unlimited tracking, magic import, iCloud backup, custom lists, and support for multiple currencies.
Orbit has a number of soon-to-be-released features, including Family Sharing, a dedicated Mac app, and advanced spending insights. With these new additions, Orbit will continue to go from strength to strength and become more and more useful to users who want full control over their spending.
Download Orbit on iOS.
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