How to Track Your Side Project Subscriptions (Before They Drain Your Wallet)

You launch a side project on a Saturday afternoon. By Sunday night, you have signed up for Vercel Pro, a managed database, an email API, a monitoring service, and maybe a domain name with auto-renewal. Each one costs between $5 and $25 per month. No big deal individually.

Then you start your next project. And the one after that.

Six months later, you check your credit card statement and find $140 in recurring charges spread across services you barely remember signing up for. One of them is for a project you abandoned in week two.

This is not a hypothetical. A 2023 survey by Leantime found that 42% of small software teams underestimate their tool spend by at least 30%. Solo developers and side project builders are even more exposed because there is no finance team sending a quarterly audit.

The Side Project Subscription Problem

The challenge is not that individual subscriptions are expensive. It is that they are invisible. Here is why they slip through:

Scattered billing. Each service bills separately. Some charge on the 1st, others on the 15th, others on anniversary dates. There is no single view of what you are paying.

Project-service disconnect. You know you are paying for Supabase, but which project is it for? If you have three projects using different databases, matching costs to projects requires digging through emails.

Free tier expiration. Many services offer generous free tiers that quietly convert to paid plans. Firebase Blaze, Vercel Pro trials, Heroku’s removal of free dynos. If you are not watching, the bill shows up silently.

Abandoned projects, active subscriptions. You stop working on a project but forget to cancel the monitoring service, the domain auto-renewal, or the CI/CD plan tied to it.

What Tracking Actually Looks Like

The goal is simple: know what you are paying, for which project, every month. Here is how to structure it.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Subscriptions

Start by listing every recurring charge. Check these sources:

• Credit card and bank statements (last 3 months)
• Email inbox (search for “receipt”, “invoice”, “billing”, “subscription”)
• Password manager (every saved login is a potential subscription)
• GitHub/Google/Apple linked apps

For each subscription, record:

• Service name
• Monthly cost (convert annual plans to monthly)
• Which project uses it
• Whether it is still needed

Step 2: Map Subscriptions to Projects

This is where most developers stop. They know the total, but they do not know the per-project cost. That matters because it changes decisions.

If your portfolio tracker side project costs $47/month in infrastructure but generates zero revenue, that is useful information. If your SaaS side project costs $23/month and brings in $80, that is a different picture entirely.

A simple spreadsheet works:

| Project        | Service       | Monthly Cost | Currency | Status   |
|----------------|---------------|-------------|----------|----------|
| DevTracker     | Vercel Pro    | $20         | USD      | Active   |
| DevTracker     | PlanetScale   | $29         | USD      | Active   |
| DevTracker     | Resend        | $0          | USD      | Free tier|
| PhotoSort      | AWS S3        | $3.50       | USD      | Active   |
| PhotoSort      | Cloudflare    | $0          | USD      | Free tier|
| BlogEngine     | Heroku        | $7          | USD      | CANCEL   |

Once you see costs grouped by project, patterns emerge. You might realize one project accounts for 60% of your total spend, or that you are paying for two overlapping services.

Step 3: Set Up Monthly Reviews

Subscriptions are not a set-and-forget problem. Services change pricing, projects evolve, and free tiers expire. Set a monthly calendar reminder to:

1. Check if any new subscriptions were added
2. Verify each active subscription is still needed
3. Look for free tier limits you are approaching
4. Cancel anything tied to an abandoned project

Step 4: Handle Multiple Currencies

If you work with international services, currency conversion adds complexity. A $5 USD service and a 500 JPY service and a 4 EUR service do not add up intuitively. You need a single reference currency for your total.

Most bank statements handle this automatically, but if you are tracking manually, pick one currency and convert everything to it. Use the rate at the time of billing, not a real-time rate.

Common Developer Subscription Stacks

To give you a reference point, here are typical monthly costs for common side project setups:

Minimal stack (free tier focused):

• Vercel (free), Supabase (free), GitHub (free), Cloudflare (free)
• Total: $0/month

Growing project:

• Vercel Pro ($20), PlanetScale ($29), Resend ($20), Sentry ($26)
• Total: ~$95/month

Multi-project developer (3 active projects):

• Mixed infrastructure across projects, some overlap
• Total: $150-300/month

The jump from zero to $95/month happens fast, usually when a single project outgrows free tier limits. The jump to $150+ happens when you have multiple projects and stop consolidating services.

Automating Subscription Tracking

Manual spreadsheets work, but they require discipline. If you want something more integrated, look for tools that can:

• Link subscriptions directly to specific projects
• Show a monthly total across all projects at a glance
• Support multiple currencies with automatic conversion
• Flag when a project is archived but still has active subscriptions

STACKFOLO includes a subscription management feature built into its project dashboard. Each project can have subscriptions attached to it, with multi-currency support and monthly totals calculated automatically. When you archive a project, its subscriptions stay visible so you remember to cancel them.

This is especially useful if you already use STACKFOLO to manage your projects, since the subscription data lives right next to your project notes, goals, and resources. No separate app to maintain.

The Real Cost of Not Tracking

The financial cost is real but manageable for most developers. The bigger issue is the cognitive overhead. When you do not know what you are paying for, you carry a low-level anxiety about it. Every credit card notification triggers a mental check: “Was that the domain renewal or the monitoring service?”

Tracking removes that noise. You know exactly what you are paying, for which project, and whether it is worth it. That clarity makes it easier to decide which projects to continue and which to sunset.

Start With a 30-Minute Audit

You do not need a complex system. Spend 30 minutes this week:

1. Pull up your last three months of bank statements
2. List every recurring tech charge
3. Map each one to a project (or mark it as “unknown”)
4. Cancel anything you do not need

If you want to keep the tracking going beyond that initial audit, a project-level dashboard makes it much easier than a spreadsheet you will forget to update.

Try STACKFOLO free on Chrome Web Store →