Subscription creep: how AI detects the charges you forgot about

You are paying for things you forgot you signed up for. A streaming service you tried for a month. A productivity app you used twice. A gym membership at a gym you moved away from. The average person underestimates their recurring charges by 40 to 50 per cent. The charges are small enough to ignore individually but large enough to matter collectively.

Era Context connects your bank accounts to any AI assistant through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). One prompt is all it takes to surface every recurring charge across all your connected accounts.

The "show me all my subscriptions" moment

Connect your accounts to Era Context, open your preferred AI client — Claude, ChatGPT, OpenClaw, or any MCP-compatible tool — and type:

"Show me all my recurring charges"

Your AI scans every connected account and returns a complete list of recurring charges. Not just the ones you remember. All of them. Grouped by category, sorted by amount, with the total at the bottom.

This is the moment most people say "I'm spending how much on subscriptions?" The number is almost always higher than expected.

What the AI surfaces

Era Context identifies recurring charges across your connected accounts. When you ask, your AI can:

• List every recurring charge with the merchant name, amount, and frequency.
• Group charges by category — streaming, software, fitness, food delivery, news, and so on.
• Calculate your total monthly subscription spend across all accounts.
• Flag charges that changed price since they first appeared.
• Identify charges you may have forgotten — services that bill annually or quarterly are easy to lose track of.
• Spot duplicate charges — two Spotify accounts, an old and new Netflix plan running simultaneously, overlapping cloud storage subscriptions.

This is not a static report. It is a conversation. You can ask follow-up questions: "When did that charge start?" or "How much have I paid to Adobe in total this year?"

How recurring charge detection works

Era Context connects to your bank accounts through MX, which supports thousands of financial institutions. Once connected, Era Context's 33 MCP tools give your AI structured access to your transaction data.

Recurring charge detection works by analysing your transaction history across all connected accounts. The AI identifies patterns — charges that repeat at regular intervals from the same merchant. This catches monthly subscriptions, annual renewals, quarterly fees, and irregular-but-recurring charges like insurance premiums.

Because Era Context has access to all your connected accounts, it catches charges you might miss if you only check one bank statement. That gym membership on your old debit card. The app subscription billing to a credit card you rarely use.

Setting up a subscription watchdog

Finding your current recurring charges is useful. Catching new ones as they appear is better.

Era Context includes a rules engine that you can set up in plain English. Ask your AI:

"Create a rule that alerts me whenever a new recurring charge appears"

Your AI creates the rule and presents it for your approval. Nothing activates without your say-so. Once approved, the rule monitors your transactions and flags any new recurring pattern it detects.

You can also create rules for specific scenarios:

• "Alert me if any subscription increases in price"
• "Tag all recurring charges under £10 as 'micro-subscriptions'"
• "Flag any recurring charge I haven't used the associated service for"

Each rule remembers the exact words you used to create it, giving you a clear audit trail of what you asked for and when.

The subscription audit: a step-by-step walkthrough

Here is a practical workflow for a complete subscription audit. Open your AI client with Era Context connected and work through these prompts:

Step 1: Get the full picture

"List all my recurring charges across all accounts, grouped by category, with monthly totals"

Step 2: Find the surprises

"Which of these recurring charges have I been paying for more than a year?"

"Are any of these charges duplicates or overlapping services?"

Step 3: Quantify the impact

"What is my total monthly subscription spend? What would it be if I cancelled the three most expensive ones?"

Step 4: Check for price increases

"Have any of my subscriptions increased in price in the last six months?"

Step 5: Set up ongoing monitoring

"Create a rule that alerts me whenever a new recurring charge appears on any account"

"Create a rule that alerts me if any existing subscription increases in price"

This entire process takes about five minutes. Without AI, it would take an afternoon of logging into individual bank accounts, downloading statements, and cross-referencing charges in a spreadsheet.

Cross-agent memory keeps your context

When you identify subscriptions you want to keep track of, you can tell your AI to remember that context:

"Remember that I want to keep Netflix, Spotify, and my gym membership, but I should review everything else quarterly"

This is stored in Era Context's cross-agent memory. The next time you ask about subscriptions — in Claude, ChatGPT, or any other connected client — your AI already knows which charges are intentional and which ones need scrutiny.

What this costs

Era Context's Basic tier is free and supports 2 connected accounts with read-only access. For a full subscription audit across all your accounts, the Organise tier at $14.99 per month supports 15 accounts with full rules engine access and unlimited categories and tags.

If the audit saves you even one forgotten $15 subscription, the product pays for itself in the first month.

Getting started

1. Sign up at era.app and connect your bank accounts through MX.
2. Connect your preferred AI client to Era Context at https://context.era.app.
3. Ask: "Show me all my recurring charges."
4. Review the list. Cancel what you do not need.
5. Set up a rule to catch new charges going forward.

You are almost certainly paying for something you forgot about. Now you have a way to find it.