Plumbing

What your bank can and cannot tell you

The bank statement feels authoritative. For store billing it is close to useless.

When four apps are billed through one store, your bank may receive a single charge from that store. One line, one amount, no names. From the statement alone there is no way to know whether that figure covers one subscription or six, or which of them you stopped using a year ago.

The store's own subscriptions screen is the only place the breakdown exists. It lists each service, each price and each renewal date — and it includes subscriptions started on devices you no longer own, because they belong to the account, not the hardware.

The old account problem

If the previous platform was signed in with a different e-mail address, the list is behind that login. Finding it is usually a matter of remembering which address, then signing in on a browser rather than a device.