How to Cancel a Subscription You Forgot You Had

The most common way people find a forgotten subscription is by scrolling through a bank statement and seeing the same ₹199 or ₹649 charge, every month, for a service they stopped using a year ago. Here's how to actually get rid of it, depending on how you were being charged.

If it's billed through the App Store or Play Store

Subscriptions bought through Apple or Google's app stores are cancelled there, not in the app itself. On Android: Play Store → profile icon → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions, find it, and cancel. On iPhone: Settings → your name → Subscriptions.

If it's billed directly by the merchant (UPI autopay or card)

This is the trickier one. You generally have two options:

• Cancel inside the app or website — most services (Netflix, Spotify, Hotstar, etc.) have a "Manage subscription" or "Cancel membership" option in account settings. This is the cleanest way, since it also stops your account access correctly.
• Revoke the mandate from your bank/UPI app — if you can't find a cancel option, or the company has made it deliberately hard to find, you can go into your UPI app (Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm) or net banking, find "Manage mandates" or "Autopay," and revoke it directly. This stops future charges even if the merchant's own cancel button is buried.

Why this keeps happening

Free trials that auto-convert, annual plans that renew silently, and "pause" features that don't actually pause billing are all common patterns. The only real fix is noticing a renewal before it happens, not after.

How Subdek helps

Subdek doesn't cancel subscriptions for you — only the merchant can do that — but it does make sure you see a reminder 3 days, 1 day, and on the day before every renewal, so "I forgot I was still paying for this" stops being the way you find out.