Questions, answered

BillSensor finds the software subscriptions you pay for by reading the billing emails already in your inbox, then warns you before each one charges.

It is a Chrome extension. It needs a free account to work, which also gives you email alerts, and paid plans add a web dashboard. It never connects to your bank and never sees your card details, because payments are handled by Paddle. It works from email alone.

When you open a billing email in Gmail, the extension reads it in your browser, recognises the tool, the amount and the next charge date, and saves it to your list.

From there it does three things:

• Warns you seven days before a charge, by browser notification, and by email when you have an account. Paid plans get a second warning three days before.
• Keeps a list of everything it has found, with the cancellation link for each tool it recognises.
• Scores each tool on how hard that company makes it to cancel.

Outlook and Microsoft 365 work differently: one connection scans twelve months of billing email in a single pass.

BillSensor cannot cancel anything for you. It gives you the warning and the link; the decision is yours.

Add it from the Chrome Web Store, then open any billing email in Gmail. That is the whole setup.

1. Open the BillSensor listing in the Chrome Web Store and choose Add to Chrome.
2. Confirm the permissions prompt.
3. Pin it so you can see it: click the puzzle piece in the toolbar, then the pin next to BillSensor.

If a Gmail tab was already open when you installed it, refresh that tab. A tab loaded before the extension existed does not have BillSensor active yet.

Yes. BillSensor needs a free account to work. It takes an email address and a password, and you do not need to connect Google or Gmail.

The account is what lets BillSensor do the things that have to happen while your browser is closed, or that need a connection:

• Email alerts, which arrive whether or not Chrome is running.
• Connecting Outlook or Microsoft 365. The scan is free, and it needs an account.
• Your subscriptions on any device, with cloud sync on paid plans.

If you used BillSensor before accounts were required, the subscriptions it had already found are saved to your account when you create it, and you can see them in the extension.

Go looking for the receipts you already have. Detection happens when you open an email, not in the background, so opening old billing emails is the fastest way to fill your list.

1. Open Gmail in the same browser.
2. Search your inbox for receipt, invoice or subscription.
3. Open each billing email. A notice appears in the corner when something is detected.
4. Click the BillSensor icon to see everything it found.

On Outlook or Microsoft 365, connecting your account scans twelve months of billing history in one go instead, on every plan. You can connect it from the extension popup or from My Account on the website.

Chrome, and other browsers built on Chromium: Edge, Brave and Opera.

It does not run in Safari or Firefox, which use a different extension system. If your mail is on Outlook or Microsoft 365, you can connect it from My Account on the website, and the scan runs on our servers without the extension.

Yes. The Free plan costs nothing and needs no payment method.

It includes unlimited detection, Chrome renewal notifications, and a 12-month Outlook scan with a manual re-scan. Your free account also gives you email alerts on your 5 lowest-cost subscriptions. Pro is $9 a month and Business is $29 a month, and both start with a 7-day free trial and carry a 14-day money-back guarantee. The full comparison is on the pricing page.

Not directly. Chrome on phones does not run extensions, and Gmail detection runs inside the extension, so detection happens on a computer.

What it finds can still reach your phone: email alerts, which need an account, arrive in your inbox wherever you read mail.

BillSensor reads the billing emails you open in Gmail and matches them in four passes, from most to least reliable: the sender's domain, then billing processors such as Stripe, Paddle or Chargebee, then the subject line, then the body.

Only confident matches are saved. A match on the sender's domain is saved and you are told. A match through a billing processor is saved only if you say yes. A match on the subject or body alone is dropped without a word.

Outlook and Microsoft 365 are scanned differently. See how Outlook scanning works.

90 SaaS tools across design, marketing, developer, hosting, finance and AI software, including Adobe, Microsoft, Notion, Figma, Slack, Canva, Mailchimp and Zapier. 68 of them already carry a cancellation difficulty score, and the rest are being researched.

The full list is on the supported tools page.

Add it yourself. Use + Add Subscription Manually in the extension popup, with the tool name, amount, billing cycle and next charge date.

Free accounts can add up to 5 subscriptions manually. Paid plans have no limit. Manually added tools have no dark pattern score, because scores exist only for the 68 tools researched so far.

BillSensor searches the email for phrases such as "next billing", "renews on" and "billed on" and uses the date it finds. A date found in an email replaces any earlier estimate.

If the email gives no date, BillSensor works one out from the billing cycle and marks it as calculated, so an estimate is never shown as fact.

BillSensor only reads an amount that sits next to a total, with labels such as "grand total", "total charged" or "amount paid". If it finds no labelled total, it saves the subscription with no amount rather than guess.

Guessing would pick up discount lines, tax lines or order numbers. If the amount matters to you, remove the entry and add it again manually with the right figure.

Eight: USD, EUR, GBP, INR, AUD, CAD, SGD and JPY. The amount is read in the currency the email was billed in and is never converted.

Yes. It works across several signed-in Gmail accounts at once, with no extra setup. Open a billing email in any of them and it is detected the same way.

Yes, on Pro and Business. Each bill is compared with the previous one for that tool, and a rise is flagged as a price increase when it is detected. A rise of 20% or more is flagged separately as an anomaly, because that usually means a plan change or a billing error.

Price changes in both directions are recorded, so your history shows drops as well as rises.

BillSensor warns you seven days before the next charge, so there is still time to decide. It cannot cancel for you, but it shows the link to the company's own cancellation page for the tools it recognises.

If a charge arrives after you have cancelled, Pro and Business plans alert you straight away. See what happens if a company charges me after I cancel.

Seven days before a charge, on every plan. Pro and Business also get a second warning three days before.

The warning comes two ways. A Chrome notification works on every plan, for every subscription. An email alert covers your 5 lowest-cost subscriptions on the Free plan, and all of them on paid plans. The 3-day second warning, by Chrome notification and by email, is Pro and Business only.

A free trial of seven days or less is shorter than that window, so the warnings move to fit inside it. The first comes at half the trial length, rounded down, and the last one day before the first charge. A seven-day trial, for example, is warned about three days and one day before it converts. Trials longer than seven days keep the usual seven-day and three-day warnings. On the Free plan you get the early warning, and the one-day warning is the second warning, which is Pro and Business only.

A Chrome notification appears on your screen while Chrome is running. It works on every plan. An email alert reaches your inbox whether or not Chrome is open.

Outlook and Microsoft 365 subscriptions get email alerts only. See why Outlook subscriptions only get email alerts.

Your 5 lowest-cost subscriptions, free trials included. They are chosen by amount, lowest first, and subscriptions with no known amount rank last.

The 5 slots stay fixed once filled, so a new subscription does not push an existing one out. If you cancel a subscription that holds a slot, the slot reopens and goes to the next one in line. Scores and cancellation links cover the 3 lowest-cost of those 5. Gmail and Outlook have separate pools of 5, so connecting Outlook does not use up your Gmail slots. Paid plans remove the limit.

Yes. Open the extension settings, where you can switch the 7-day alert, the dark pattern alert and the monthly summary on or off.

By email, yes. A Chrome notification needs your browser to be open when the alert is due, so if your device was off or Chrome was not running, it has nothing to reach.

That is why email alerts matter: they do not depend on your browser.

On Pro and Business, BillSensor emails you after a free trial ends and asks whether the trial converted. BillSensor only sees a charge when you open the receipt, so it cannot tell on its own whether the trial became a paid subscription or you cancelled in time.

The email has an answer button. Tell BillSensor which it was, in one click, and it tracks the subscription properly from then on. Trials are left out of your spend total, so your answer keeps that total accurate. The email is not part of the Free plan. On Free, the extension still asks inside its popup when a trial ends on one of your 5 slotted subscriptions, and a row beyond those 5 shows TRIAL ENDED instead of claiming the trial is still free.

No. BillSensor tells you what is about to happen and shows the company's own cancellation page, but you complete the cancellation with that company.

It also cannot block a payment or reverse a charge that has already gone through. Once money has moved, that is between you, the company and your bank.

A rating from 1 to 10 for how much effort a company requires to cancel, based on its published policies and documented customer complaints.

Adobe scores 9 out of 10, largely because of the early termination fee on annual plans. A high score means cancelling takes more work, not that the company is doing anything unlawful.

Free shows the score and the cancellation link for your 3 lowest-cost subscriptions. Pro and Business show them for every tool.

Cancel it with the company first, then mark the subscription as cancelled in BillSensor, in the extension or on the dashboard.

On Pro and Business, BillSensor then keeps checking it for charges that arrive after the date you cancelled.

On Pro and Business, BillSensor alerts you straight away. Once you mark a subscription as cancelled, it keeps checking it, and a billing email from that tool dated after your cancellation triggers the alert.

You also get a reminder seven days before the original renewal date, so you can confirm the cancellation went through. The reminder email lists what to check and has a Verify Cancellation button. The Free plan does not include this monitoring.

A timestamped record of when you cancelled, available on Pro and Business. Keep it or print it, and attach it if you need to dispute a charge that turns up afterwards.

It is evidence, not a guarantee. Whether a company or your bank refunds a charge is their decision.

No. There is no Google sign-in, no permissions screen and no access token. BillSensor does not connect to your Google account.

Instead the extension runs inside the Gmail tab you already have open and reads what is already on your screen. If you have used tools that ask you to "connect your Gmail", this is deliberately not that. The full explanation is in how BillSensor reads Gmail.

In Gmail, only the one you have open, and only while you are looking at it. It does not scan your mailbox, read closed emails or run in the background. It runs only on Gmail pages and is not active on any other website.

Outlook and Microsoft 365 work differently, because the scan runs on our servers. See what BillSensor reads in Outlook.

No, in either mailbox. In Gmail the text of your email stays in your browser. What is sent to your account is the result of reading it: the tool name, the amount, the currency, the billing cycle, the next charge date and the cancellation link.

With Outlook, the scan runs on our servers. The email content is processed to recognise the subscription and is not stored. What we keep is the subscription.

No. In Gmail the extension has no ability to write anything. It reads the page you have open, the same way you are reading it.

In Outlook the connection uses the read-only Mail.Read permission, so it cannot send, delete or change anything in your mailbox either.

Everything travels over HTTPS, passwords are hashed with bcrypt before storage, and sign-in tokens are signed and expire after 30 days. Account and subscription data is kept in a secured database on Hostinger servers.

Payment details are handled entirely by Paddle, so we never see or store a card number. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Only the services that run BillSensor: Paddle for payments, Resend for email delivery (only your email address is shared), and Microsoft if you connect Outlook, where we send them your authorisation and not your data.

We do not sell your data, we do not use it to train any model, and we do not share it with advertisers.

No. The website keeps your sign-in in your browser's local storage, and the extension uses its own storage. There are no tracking or advertising cookies, and no analytics script on our pages.

Pages do load fonts from Google and launch-directory badges from third-party sites, which receive your IP address when the page loads.

Differently from Gmail, because there is no browser tab to read. You authorise read-only access to your mailbox through Microsoft, and the scan runs on our servers.

The first scan covers twelve months of billing history. After that it looks only at what has arrived since. On the Free plan you start that re-scan yourself with Scan now. On Pro and Business it runs automatically every day. You can disconnect at any time.

Yes. The first twelve-month scan is free on every plan, and so is a manual re-scan. The automatic daily re-scan is part of Pro and Business.

You need a BillSensor account. Then choose Connect Outlook in the extension popup, or in My Account on the website, and approve the request on Microsoft's own screen.

The first scan takes a minute or two. If you used the popup, keep the Microsoft tab open until it confirms.

For each message it reads the subject, sender, recipients, date and a short preview of the body, through Microsoft Graph, so it can recognise a billing email.

That content is processed, not stored. What we keep is the subscription we recognised: the tool, the amount, the currency, the billing cycle and the next charge date.

Gmail detection runs in your browser, so BillSensor can show a Chrome notification. An Outlook scan runs on our servers, with no browser trigger, so its alerts are sent by email. That also means you need an account to receive them.

Disconnect from the extension at any time. Disconnecting deletes the access token we hold and stops all scanning.

You can also withdraw our access from your own Microsoft account settings.

On a work or school Microsoft 365 account, your IT admin may need to approve third-party apps first. That is a Microsoft policy setting, not something BillSensor controls.

Ask your admin to approve BillSensor's Mail.Read permission request, or to pre-approve it for the organisation if several people need to connect.

On the Free plan, Outlook does not re-check by itself. Press Scan now in the popup to pick up new mail.

On Pro and Business the re-scan runs automatically once a day, so a very recent email can take up to 24 hours to appear.

Free detects unlimited subscriptions and gives you email alerts on your 5 lowest-cost. Pro removes the limits and adds the dashboard and monitoring. Business adds a shared view for up to 10 people.

• Free, $0. Unlimited detection (Gmail, or a 12-month Outlook scan), Chrome renewal notifications on everything, email alerts on your 5 lowest-cost, scores and cancel links on your 3 lowest-cost, and up to 5 manually added subscriptions.
• Pro, $9 a month. Everything unlimited, the web dashboard, billing history, a second warning three days before each charge, price increase alerts, post-cancellation monitoring, cancellation records, an automatic daily Outlook re-scan and cloud sync.
• Business, $29 a month. Everything in Pro for each member, up to 10 seats with the admin included, a team overview, and priority support.

The side-by-side breakdown is on the pricing page.

Paid plans are billed monthly through Paddle, our Merchant of Record, which handles payment, tax and receipts. We never see or store your card details.

The Free plan needs no payment method. Pro and Business start with a 7-day free trial.

Pro and Business both start with 7 days free, with every feature unlocked. You are not charged during the trial, and we email you before anything is charged.

Cancel before the trial ends and you pay nothing. If you keep the plan, billing starts at the end of the seventh day.

From the pricing page, the extension, or My Account on the website. Choose the plan and checkout opens in place. Access is applied as soon as the payment clears.

If the extension still shows the old plan, it refreshes on its own within a few hours, or straight away if you sign out and back in.

Open My Account, go to Plan & Billing and choose Manage Plan, which opens the Paddle billing portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. If you cancel during the free trial, before it ends, you are not charged.

There is no downgrade step: cancelling is how you move to Free. A plan we granted you, rather than one you bought, is not billed through Paddle. Email hello@billsensor.com to change one of those.

You keep your paid plan until the end of the billing period you already paid for. After that your account is treated as Free, with the Free limits: email alerts on your 5 lowest-cost subscriptions, scores and cancel links on your 3 lowest-cost, and no dashboard, post-cancellation monitoring or automatic Outlook re-scan.

There is no downgrade step, so cancelling is how you leave a paid plan. Cancel before you delete your account, because deletion is refused while a paid plan is active.

Yes. You can have a full refund within 14 days of your first payment, with no questions asked and no reason needed.

Email hello@billsensor.com from the address on your account. Refunds are processed by Paddle. The details are in the refund policy.

No. Payment is handled entirely by Paddle, so card details never reach BillSensor.

The dashboard is the web view of everything the extension has found: your spend, what renews next, your full subscription list and your billing history.

It is a paid feature, included in Pro and Business. Free has no dashboard, and on that plan the extension popup is the full picture.

Sign in on billsensor.com and open Dashboard from the menu. It uses the same login as the extension. It needs a Pro or Business plan.

Monthly Spend is what your active subscriptions cost each month. Yearly Estimate projects that across the year, with yearly plans spread over the months. The chart shows the next six months at the current rate.

Dashed months are estimated from when each subscription was detected and cancelled, so a rise there can mean BillSensor found more, not that you spent more. Solid months were recorded at the time.

Spend is shown in the currency you were actually billed in. Amounts in other currencies are never converted at an invented rate. They are counted separately and labelled.

Use Add New Subscription. Manual Add takes the tool name, amount, billing cycle and next charge date. CSV Upload takes a file with one subscription per row, in the format tool_name,amount,billing_cycle,next_charge.

Imported rows are added like manual subscriptions. A header row is fine.

Billing history is part of Pro and Business. It shows the bills BillSensor has recorded for each tool, including price changes in both directions. Find it on the dashboard or in the extension settings.

The dashboard splits your list into Active and Cancelled tabs. A subscription you mark as cancelled moves to Cancelled, where Pro and Business keep checking it for charges that arrive afterwards.

Everything in Pro for every member, plus a shared view for the whole team. Business costs $29 a month and covers up to 10 seats, with the admin included.

It also gives the admin a team overview of every member's spend and renewals, lets members use Gmail or Outlook in any mix, and includes priority support.

The admin invites each person by email from the business dashboard. The person accepts the invitation and gets everything in Pro. Remove a member at any time to free their seat.

The team overview shows every member's spend, renewals and subscriptions in one view. That is subscription information only.

The admin cannot read a member's email. BillSensor does not store email content, so there is none to see.

Yes, in any mix. Each member uses the extension for Gmail or connects Outlook themselves, and their detections feed the team overview.

Up to 10, with the admin counted as one. The price is $29 a month for the whole team.

Sign in from the extension popup or from billsensor.com, with the same account. You stay signed in for up to 30 days.

The two stay in step in one direction: signing out of the extension also signs the website out, but signing out of the website leaves the extension signed in.

Open My Account on billsensor.com, choose Security and use Change Password.

Open the reset password page, enter the email address on your BillSensor account and choose Send reset link. We email you a link to choose a new password. The link works once and expires after one hour.

From My Account, under Delete Account. The same control is in the extension settings.

Cancel any paid plan first. Deletion is refused while a plan is still active, which protects you from being billed for an account that no longer exists. It is immediate and permanent. Your account, every subscription recorded for you, your alert history, your Microsoft access token if you connected Outlook, any support requests and any newsletter subscription are all removed, with no recovery window.

Anything the extension stored on your own device stays until you clear it from the extension settings or uninstall it.

Everything we hold for you is visible in the extension, and on the dashboard if you are on a paid plan. My Account also shows your plan, your alert history and what is connected, such as Outlook.

For a copy of your data, or to have something corrected, email hello@billsensor.com.

Use the support request button on this page, or email hello@billsensor.com. Include the tool, what you expected and what happened, and your browser if it is a detection problem.

Most misses come down to one of four things:

• You have not opened the email. Gmail detection runs only when you click into a billing email.
• The Gmail tab was open before you installed. Refresh it once.
• The tool is not on the list. Check the supported tools, or add it with + Add Subscription Manually.
• The email was archived or deleted before you installed. Detection cannot reach mail it never saw.

Refresh your Gmail tab, then open a billing email. Detection only runs on emails you open.

If nothing happens, check that BillSensor is switched on at chrome://extensions, that you are using Chrome or another Chromium browser, and that the extension is up to date. If detection stopped suddenly after working, Gmail may have changed its page, and fixes arrive through extension updates.

Still nothing? Raise a support request with your browser and the tool you expected.

BillSensor reads the amount and date from the billing email itself. If the email states neither clearly, uses an unusual format, or shows a prorated or partial charge, the value it picks up can be off.

Remove the incorrect entry and add it again manually with the right amount and date, using + Add Subscription Manually.

This usually happens when a marketing email from a tracked tool looks enough like a billing email to match. It is a false positive from the sender-matching step, not a sign anything is wrong with your account.

Use Remove on that entry in the popup or the dashboard. It does not affect your other subscriptions, and removing is available on every plan.

Check your spam folder first, and that the address on your BillSensor account is the one you are checking. Then check these:

• Are you signed in? Email alerts go to the address on your account, so sign in again if the extension has signed you out. Browser notifications only fire while Chrome is running.
• Does the subscription hold an alert slot? On the Free plan, email alerts cover your 5 lowest-cost subscriptions. The rest get browser notifications.
• Is the renewal date right? Alerts fire seven days before the stored next charge date. If that date is wrong, the alert fires at the wrong time.

If everything looks right and nothing arrived, tell us the tool and the date it should have fired.

Chrome notifications fire only if your browser is open when the alert is due. If your device was off or Chrome was not running, the notification has nothing to reach.

Your free account also sends email alerts, which arrive whether or not your browser is open.

A few possibilities: the scan may still be running (a twelve-month scan takes a minute or two), there may genuinely be no billing emails from tracked tools in your last twelve months, or the connection did not fully complete.

Wait a couple of minutes and reopen the popup. If nothing appears, choose Connect Outlook again to confirm the connection went through.

This is usually a short delay between your purchase and the extension recognising the new plan.

Sign out and back in from the popup. If locked subscriptions are still showing after that, raise a support request and we will sort it out directly.

Scores exist only for the 68 tools BillSensor has researched so far. Manually added subscriptions, tools outside the list, and newer tools still being researched have no score, because there is no verified complaint data behind one yet.

Four browser permissions and two sites.

• Storage saves your subscription list in your browser.
• Alarms schedules your renewal alerts.
• Notifications shows the Chrome notification.
• Scripting lets BillSensor start in Gmail tabs that were already open when you installed it.
• mail.google.com is where it reads the billing email you open.
• billsensor.com keeps your sign-in in step between the website and the extension.

There is no Google sign-in permission and no access to other sites.

A Gmail tab that was open before the extension was installed or updated does not have BillSensor active yet. Refresh the tab once and detection works from then on.

On your own device, in your browser's extension storage. The subscription details are also synced to your account in our database, so email alerts can be sent and your subscriptions are backed up. Email content is not stored anywhere.

Open the extension settings and choose Clear all local data, or uninstall the extension. Either removes what is stored in your browser.

Neither deletes your account. To remove the account as well, see how to delete your account.

Open chrome://extensions, find BillSensor and choose Remove. Uninstalling does not delete your account or cancel a paid plan, so do those first if you want them gone.