I found out I had way more monthly subscriptions than I initially thought, and that was after trimming down quite a few. It’s easy to sign up for services and forget about them; in fact, according to a 2024 report, the average American has between four and five subscriptions and pays roughly $924 per year — that’s about $77 per month — on subscriptions. That’s easy to believe, especially when a premium-tier Netflix subscription is $25 on its own. Throw in just a couple of other streaming services and those costs stack up fast.
Enter Wallos. This handy, self-hosted tool helped me list out every subscription I’m currently subscribed to. In the course of listing all of them, I discovered quite a few that needed to be canceled (especially more obscure streaming services). Without Wallos, I might have discovered them eventually, but until that time, they would have eaten away at my bank account each month.
And unlike comparable services like RocketMoney, Wallos is free. I know the old expression says you have to spend money to make money, but I don’t want to spend money to save money.
With Wallos, I own the data
It can’t be used for targeted ads
Many paid subscription trackers sell your information to data brokers, and it’s then used to pitch you similar services. Even services that supposedly protect your data are still vulnerable to data breaches. If you want to ensure your information remains as protected as possible (barring the not-infrequent breaches suffered by subscription services themselves), self-hosting is the way to go. You can argue that your own system might be vulnerable, too, but at least you’re in control of security.
7 reasons Wallos is the best way to track your subscriptions
This open-source subscription tracking app is surprisingly powerful
I receive notifications of upcoming payments
I’m never surprised
One of my favorite Wallos features is that it can send notifications of upcoming payments through a variety of services, including email, Discord, Telegram, and a host of others. Some credit cards and banks offer payment notifications, but many are only after the fact. Wallos makes it possible to get a reminder up to seven days before the payment date, although I can set reminders to be sent out a whopping 180 days before a service is set to be canceled.
Aside from the more mainstream options, I can choose to receive notifications through services like Webhook, Serverchan, Ntfy, and more. It’s immensely customizable, with more than 30 different currency choices and over a dozen predetermined categories. If those aren’t enough, you can add your own categories and update the currency list, although automatic conversion is limited to what’s available on fixer.io.
Wallos automatically creates graphs and charts for data visualization
I can see where my money goes
While it isn’t strictly a budgeting app, Wallos shares many similar features. For example, I can set a monthly budget in my profile for how much I want to spend on subscriptions, and it will automatically display how much I’m going to spend per month (and per year) on all subscriptions, as well as how much of my budget remains at any given time each month. If I navigate to the Statistics option in the drop-down menu, I can see a breakdown of expenses by category, by payment method, and by cost versus remaining budget.
Seeing data in a more visual format can make it easier to process. Again, Wallos isn’t technically a budgeting app — I wouldn’t use it for managing whole-home finances — but it’s excellent for tracking subscriptions, especially those you might forget about. As I was setting up the app, I found multiple smaller subscriptions that were eating up $5 to $10 each month, such as a payment to Inkarnate (a map-making service) and a $0.99 per month payment for increased iCloud storage.
Wallos doesn’t connect to your bank accounts
It won’t automatically identify costs
Services like RocketMoney can scan your monthly expenses and identify subscriptions, but Wallos doesn’t offer that feature. All subscriptions have to be manually entered. That can be a lot of work when you’re initially setting the app up, especially if you haven’t done an audit of your finances in a while, but the time is well spent. After you have Wallos set up, you can easily add or remove subscriptions as your choices change, and it helps prevent you from being caught off guard by an expense you didn’t see coming.
The lack of automation is a perk
I prefer to limit access to my accounts
One of the biggest reasons I don’t use services like Monarch Money is that I don’t like providing third-party applications access to my banking info. I prefer to limit how much of my personal life is visible to services I use. That’s why self-hosting is so appealing: I control the data and the privacy. It can be as robust (or as weak) as I want it to be, but either way, I don’t have to put my faith in a nameless, faceless corporation in exchange for convenience.
Wallos has already helped me cut costs
My favorite kind of software is free. My second favorite kind is one that helps me save money. Wallos, thankfully, is both. I have to be intentional about adding subscriptions to the app, and that awareness makes it easy for me to stay on top of things that I might otherwise miss. I love having reminders, too; while I don’t typically use Telegram, linking Wallos to Discord is a huge boon for knowing when a payment is about to be pulled.
