Stop the financial bleed! How Orbit fights back against the dreaded 'Subscription Creep' | Tech Radar

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Stop the financial bleed! How Orbit fights back against the dreaded 'Subscription Creep'

Homescreen Heroes: Orbit helps you track your subscriptions like a pro

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It appears that all of life is becoming one big subscription fest. There’s Netflix, Spotify, Xbox Game Pass, Play Station Plus, food order subscriptions, Duolingo, Amazon, and You Tube. Can you believe there’s even a subscription for buying socks? Look, the list could go on, but I don’t want to bore you or myself.

Subscription services are here to stay, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. As much as we hate them draining our money every month, if we want the goods, we must accept that, in return, we have to part with our hard-earned cash.

Even though we can’t avoid subscriptions, there is an easy way to manage them, and it’s called Orbit. Yes, the irony is not lost on me. In an attempt to get a grip on our subscriptions, I’m recommending subscribing to another app. It’s just the way it is, I’m afraid.

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Orbit is a beautifully designed subscription tracker app that is designed to solve the growing problem of subscription creep. It acts as a financial watchdog that uncovers every bill draining your account and centralizes them into one elegant interface. This all but eliminates the stress of surprise charges and helps you reclaim control over your wallet.

I was expecting to have to add each individual subscription manually, and even though this functionality is present in the app, there’s actually a much smarter way to load all your subscriptions into Orbit.

It’s called Magic Import, and it simplifies the tedious task of manual entry by capturing financial information directly from screenshots, bank statements, CSV files, or PDFs.

This is made possible through a mix of very clever AI and OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and I have to say it’s very good indeed. I uploaded a number of different files and found Orbit reliably picked up what I needed it to.

The main homescreen lets you see your subscriptions in a list format, but the calendar view shows you when the money is actually going to leave your pocket. This helps you spot heavy payment days or times of the month where multiple subscriptions are bunched together. Armed with this type of information, you can plan ahead to make sure you’ve got the money set aside in your bank account.

The calendar view also includes readouts for the total cost of subscriptions throughout the month as well as a live countdown of how much money you still need to account for before the month ends. I process information visually and have found the calendar invaluable for tracking my own personal subscriptions.

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There are also notifications that act as a proactive defense and are designed to bridge the gap between knowing you have a subscription and acting before you are charged. This is maybe most critical when you add a service marked as trial. Orbit will calculate the expiration date and send you a notification, usually 24–48 hours, before the trial period ends.

It’ll also send you renewal reminders for recurring bills. This is incredibly useful for cash flow management, especially for services that cost a lot of money. No one likes being surprised by a sudden large financial deduction, and notification reminders minimize the chances of it happening.

So, if you’ve ever subscribed to a service only to realize that a number of months down the line, you’re no longer using the service but you’re still paying for it, Orbit is designed just for you. It’s for those people who have anxiety around the build-up of bills and want a simple one-app solution for managing it all.

The free version is extremely limited, so I’d recommend paying the lifetime fee of $24.99 / £24.99 to gain access to the full range of premium features. These include unlimited tracking, magic import, i Cloud backup, custom lists, and support for multiple currencies.

Orbit has a number of soon-to-be-released features that include family sharing, a dedicated Mac app, and advanced spending insights. With these new additions, Orbit will go from strength to strength and become increasingly helpful to users who want complete control over their spending.

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Writer, app-hoarder, and professional "low battery" enthusiast. Paul spends his days testing wearables so you don’t have to, and his nights wondering if his sleep tracker is judging him. He’s fascinated by the tech that claims to make us better humans—and if it’s wearable, downloadable, or requires a firmware update, he has thoughts on it.

With over 20 years of experience and a first-class Computer Science degree, Paul has navigated the front lines of the tech and creative industries. His work has been published internationally and appears regularly in Digital Camera World and Creative Bloq.

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• Stop the financial bleed

• Homescreen Heroes: Orbit helps you track your subscriptions like a pro