Can I code this? A Personal Subscription Tracker

A list of your own subscriptions with renewal dates and a running total is genuinely simple CRUD — fittingly, given this whole site exists to help you decide which of those subscriptions to keep.

Build it
Effort: an eveningRunning cost: $0/mo to start

Why CanICodeThis says Build it

  • A list of subscriptions with name, cost, billing cycle, and renewal date is ordinary CRUD
  • A running total of monthly and yearly spend across all subscriptions is simple arithmetic
  • Email reminders a few days before a renewal is one transactional-email call on a schedule

The parts that'll cause problems

  • Automatically detecting subscriptions from bank or card statements needs a real bank-sync integration, the same caution as every finance app on this register
  • Price-change detection (did this subscription just get more expensive) needs either manual re-entry or a fragile scraping approach
  • Shared household subscriptions split across people add real multi-user complexity

How I'd build this

frontendAstro or Next.js
databaseTurso (SQLite)
emailResend
hostingCloudflare Pages

MVP scope

  • Manually add subscriptions with cost, billing cycle, and renewal date
  • A running monthly and yearly total
  • Email reminder before a renewal date

Postpone to v2

  • Bank/card statement import (real security surface — same caution as this register's finance apps)
  • Price-change tracking over time
  • Shared household subscriptions

What it actually costs to build

AI agent — with a subscription (Claude Pro/Max, Cursor, etc.)$0 marginal
AI agent — pay-per-use API, no subscription$16–$27 one-time
Hosting, once it's running$0/mo (free tier)
Domain name, if you want your own~$12/yr

Existing tools solving a similar problem typically run $14.99–$14.99/mo — see how they compare below.

The build prompt

Build me a subscription tracker: manually add subscriptions with cost, billing cycle, and renewal date, see a running monthly and yearly total, and get an email reminder a few days before a renewal. SQLite behind a small API, single-user login. Skip bank-statement auto-import for v1 — manual entry is safer to start with.

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