Managing Subscriptions and Personal Finance Just Got Easier: Thanks to AI
7 mins read
Published Nov 28, 2025
Managing subscriptions and personal finances for many has always felt a bit like a chore. Most people bounce between spreadsheets, email receipts, bank apps and manual reminders. And in a world where everything is becoming a subscription: software, entertainment, AI tools, fitness, learning, it’s easier than ever to lose track of what you’re actually paying for.
With rising cost of living and global economic pressures, money management and visibility matters more than ever. When you can see things clearly, it becomes easier to spot money leaks, avoid surprises, and reduce the mental clutter that comes from not effectively managing your finances.
AI is about to disrupt this whole experience. Not by adding more complexity, but by removing friction and making money management feel lighter, automated and more intuitive.
In this article we cover how we see this playing out:
Smarter, More Accurate Subscription and Transaction Detection
For years, subscription and budgeting apps have relied mainly on bank-connect tools like Plaid to pull transactions and detect monthly payments.
It works, but users have gotten frustrated with how incomplete the data often is: strange merchant names, no seat counts for SaaS tools, wrong categorisations, blank App Store subscriptions and anything buried in email receipts.
AI can close these gaps in smart ways by pulling information from multiple sources and intuitively piecing it together:
• Recognising patterns in transaction history and matching/fixing categorisation based on trained data.
• Extracting extra details from email connecting.
• Pulling in data from uploaded screenshots or invoices.
• Rebuilding old maintained spreadsheets into clean subscription lists.
This means fewer blind spots and far less manual work. Over time, AI learns your patterns and categorises things more accurately, giving you a clearer picture of where your money actually goes.
More Personalised Support
Not everyone wants constant notifications about their spending. Some want cheaper alternatives. Others want simple renewal reminders. Some want budgeting guidance.
AI makes this flexible. You could customise and choose where you want support or when you want just the basics:
• Suggestions for cheaper tool alternatives
• Quiet mode except for renewal alerts
• Alerts about unusual spending
• Help building budgets or financial goals
Getting intuitive support from AI to save you time and money, but having the choice to opt in or out.
Goal Setting That Feels Natural
Budgets and goals only work when they’re realistic. AI can look at how you already spend, help you to set goals. suggest achievable budgets, and nudge you when you’re drifting off track.
It’s less about strict rules and more about a helpful copilot that makes staying on top of things feel easier.
Automatic Cost Savings
AI can keep an eye out for small savings that are easy to miss or take time to find:
• Discounts on subscriptions you already have
• Cashback opportunities
• Cheaper alternatives to tools you use
• Reminders when you’re overpaying for unused software
Instead of spending hours hunting for deals, the information finds you when you need it.
Smarter Notifications That Are Actually Useful
Instead of simply generic in platform alerts, AI could alert you on things that matter with the option to turn on or off:
• “Your renewal hits in 3 days: are you still using this app?”
• “This transaction looks unusual for you.”
• “Your spending this month is trending higher than normal and outside or budgeting goals.”
• “This subscription hasn’t been used in months."
More intuitive money management.
Easier Money Management (The Most Important Part)
AI mixed with personal finance apps can reduce the mental load of money management by taking over much of the set up and maintenance. Think of it like your own bookeeper updating and keeping things organised:
Set up without a lot of manual work
Organising/categorising your spending automatically
Keeping subscriptions updated and tidy
Updating budgets as your habits change
Surfacing insights before you have to ask
Reducing repetitive tasks (like categorising or checking renewals)
Instead of feeling out of control with your finances, AI could help keep everything running smoothly. You still have control, it just becomes much easier to stay organised without thinking about it all the time.
Agentic Payments & the Future of Automation
The next evolution is agentic payments: systems where AI can pay for services on your behalf, optimise how you’re billed, manage upgrades or downgrades, and maintain clean recurring payments behind the scenes. New rails like x402 are early examples of this.
This will become an integral part of how AI will help you to optimise your money.
How Orbit Plans to Use AI in money management.
Orbit is being built around these ideas from the start.
We will be implement many of these concepts and initially use AI to:
• Fill gaps in subscription detection
• Help with subscription cancellations
• Combine bank data with email parsing for better accuracy
• Help users easily load data from existing sources
• Recommend smarter, cheaper options in an integrated deals market
• Send helpful alerts and reminders
The goal is simple:
Build the one platform to manage your subscriptions (and eventually personal finance) with more visibility and less friction, so you can save more money and keep focusing on things you love.
Join the Orbit waitlist if you want early access as these features roll out, and early adopter benefits.
