Adobe raised prices again in 2025 — somewhere between 10 and 20%, confirmed by Gartner. If you didn't notice, you probably just absorbed it. And if you're a freelancer running business and personal subscriptions through the same bank account, there's a reasonable chance you neither noticed the increase nor remembered which subscriptions are actually deductible.
Quick answer
For most freelancers, the right tracker is one that does three things: lets you tag each subscription as business or personal, gives you a renewable-date view so annual billing cycles don't blindside your cash flow, and exports your data cleanly enough that tax time doesn't require reconstructing six months of bank statements. A manual-entry app (no bank link required) is usually safer than a bank-synced one — 60% of popular budgeting apps share data with third parties, and a freelancer's payment history is more sensitive than a salaried employee's.
Why bank-synced apps are the wrong default for freelancers
Rocket Money and Monarch Money are fine personal finance tools — but they're built for the salaried-employee use case, where all income lands in one account and "subscriptions" means Netflix, Spotify, and a gym membership. Freelancers' situations are messier: client payments share a transaction history with software subscriptions that are half-business, half-hobby, and a gym membership that is definitively not deductible.
The bank-sync model also creates a data-sharing risk that's worth taking seriously. The 2024 Evolve Bank breach demonstrated how a single vulnerability at one fintech node can simultaneously expose users of dozens of connected apps. For a freelancer whose payment patterns reveal which clients they're working with and what tools they use, that's not an abstract concern.
Apps that require manual entry — SubChecks, Bobby, or something like Subnesio — sidestep this entirely. The tradeoff is that you have to actually enter data — which is a real cost, but for most freelancers tracking 15–30 subscriptions, an afternoon of setup is a reasonable price for not handing your payment history to a data broker.
What tax authorities actually want from your records
IRS Section 162(a) covers software subscription deductions as "ordinary and necessary" business expenses — but the operative word is "business." If you use Figma for client work and for personal projects, you deduct the business-use percentage, not the full cost. The Schedule C instructions are explicit about this: "Deduct only the business-use percentage if you also use the software personally."
The IRS discontinued its canonical Publication 535 (Business Expenses) in 2023 and now directs sole proprietors to Publication 334 instead — which is a meaningful change, because a lot of accountants still cite Pub 535. The underlying standard hasn't changed, but the documentation has shifted.
For UK sole traders, HMRC's S34 ITTOIA 2005 "wholly and exclusively" test is stricter: if you can't identify a definite business proportion, the entire expense is disallowed — not just the personal fraction. This makes clean category tagging more consequential than it is for a US Schedule C filer. A tracker that lets you record 70% business / 30% personal against a specific subscription is doing actual work, not just organizational housekeeping. If you're unsure how to organize receipts alongside this, this post on subscription receipts for taxes walks through the documentation side.
Comparing the main options
TrackMySubs has the clearest path to a tax-ready export: CSV available on all plans including the free tier (up to 10 subscriptions), with unlimited at $10/month or $99.99/year. The CSV format lets you manipulate the data in a spreadsheet before handing it to an accountant. It doesn't publicly document multi-currency support — relevant if you're a UK or European freelancer paying for USD-denominated tools.
SubChecks is targeted explicitly at freelancers: one-time $29, groups subscriptions by project or client, calculates normalized monthly costs for annual plans, and sends renewal reminders 7 days before annual renewals. No bank sync, and no CSV export — which is the meaningful gap if you need to produce a deductible-expenses list at year end.
Bobby (iOS only, $2.99 one-time) is a clean minimal tracker — good for personal use, not built for the business/personal split that freelancers need. No CSV export.
A spreadsheet — Google Sheets or Excel — is worth taking seriously as a genuine option rather than a fallback. It costs nothing, allows fully custom columns (subscription name, vendor, IRS Schedule C line, billing cycle, business/personal tag, annual total), and produces exactly the format an accountant expects. The tradeoff: no renewal alert system, and no mobile widget telling you that your $600 Adobe CC renewal lands next Tuesday.
I think the irony problem is worth naming directly: TrackMySubs at $10/month and Monarch at $14.99/month are themselves recurring costs. For a freelancer tracking 10–20 subscriptions, the annual tracker cost ($120–$180) may exceed the savings from catching one forgotten subscription — which is the logic behind SubChecks' one-time fee and Bobby's $2.99 unlock, and it's worth thinking through before you commit to a monthly subscription to manage your monthly subscriptions.
Annual renewals are the specific risk worth managing
A monthly Figma plan renews every cycle and appears on every bank statement. A $600 annual Adobe CC renewal can land on a date you forgot about, right before a major client invoice is due — temporarily straining cash flow at the worst possible moment. A C+R Research survey found that 74% of people said it was easy to forget recurring charges, and 42% admitted they'd been paying for a subscription they no longer used. The average American spends $219/month on subscriptions but estimates only $86 — a gap that hits freelancers harder when business tools are mixed in with personal ones.
Trackers that only show a monthly burn rate, without flagging the specific date and amount of an upcoming annual renewal, solve a simpler problem than the one freelancers actually have. The renewal-alert function isn't a nice-to-have; it's the feature that prevents a surprise $300 charge from showing up the same week you're waiting on a late client payment.
If you want to see what a tracker built for this looks like, Subnesio's pricing page shows what the reminder and tagging features cover.
The best tracker is the one you'll actually keep updated — the simplest one you can live with, not the most feature-rich one you'll open twice and forget.
