Cancel it where you subscribed, which for most app subscriptions is Apple or Google rather than the company itself. When you cannot tell who is charging you, work back from the payment to the merchant's name before you touch the card.
Mind My Money finds every recurring payment on your own computer, names the ones your statement hides, and cancels the ones you say no to.
This is for the two cases the platforms' own help pages do not cover: a charge you cannot identify, and a subscription that keeps billing after you thought it was gone. Every page quoted here was read on 22 September 2026.
A subscription is cancelled wherever the money is taken, and for anything bought inside an app that is Apple or Google rather than the company whose name is on the service. Writing to the company does nothing if the company never charged you, and neither does deleting the app. Google Play says so in as many words: “When you uninstall an app, your subscription won't cancel.”
Apple. Open your subscription list, on the device under your name in Settings, or at account.apple.com. If there is no Cancel button, or the subscription shows an expiry date in red, it is already cancelled. A trial has to be cancelled “at least 24 hours before the trial ends”.
Google Play. Cancel from the subscriptions page in the Play app or on the web. You keep what you have paid for: “When you cancel a subscription, you'll still be able to use your subscription for the time you've already paid.” Its own example is a yearly subscription bought on 1 January and cancelled on 1 July, which runs to 31 December and is not renewed.
One trap sits between the two. An Amazon Prime Video add-on bought through Apple is cancelled on Apple's terms, and Amazon's help page says cancellations then have to happen at least 24 hours before it renews. Whenever a service is billed by somebody other than the service, the biller's deadline is the one that counts.
The cancelling is rarely the hard part. What stops people is the nine years of viewing history, the playlists, the photos that are only in one place, or the email address half their other logins still point at. Almost all of it can be kept, and almost none of it can be kept afterwards, so this is the step that belongs before the cancel button rather than after it.
Most services hold your things for a while, and the periods are not obvious. Netflix keeps viewing activity, ratings and recommendations for 24 months after the account closes and restores them if you come back. Amazon gives you 180 days to pull photos that are over the free 5 GB. Google says content over quota “may be deleted” after two years, while Gmail starts bouncing incoming mail straight away. Apple's help page gives no deletion date at all; the only number Apple publishes is in the iCloud terms, where it may delete data over your limit “upon 30 days' notice”.
Where there is an export, use it while the account is still live. Netflix's viewing activity downloads as a spreadsheet from the profile page, and once the account is inactive the only route left is a formal request for a copy of your information, which takes up to 30 days. Spotify, Google and Apple all have a download-your-data page; Spotify's default package covers only the past year, so ask for the extended one.
An email address that came with your broadband is the one people forget, and it is the one that takes other accounts down with it. It is worth reading what your provider does with it before the end date, because with some of them the way to save the mailbox closes on the day you leave.
The commonest version of this is not a hidden account. It is that the charge was never Apple's or Google's at all, and Apple's own page tells you what to do about it: “You might've bought the subscription from another company. To find out which company bills you, check your bank or credit card statement.”
Two more places it hides. It may be on a different account of yours, which both Apple and Google say to check by searching your email for the receipt and reading which account it names. And on Apple it may belong to somebody else in the family: “You can't cancel a family member's subscription.” They have to do it.
If the statement line itself is the problem, the line is usually a payment processor rather than the shop. Klarna, PayPal, Trustly, Adyen, Paytrail and Stripe all appear under their own names, and the way back to the shop is the date and the amount, searched in your email, in the processor's own app, or against your photos from that day. Working through a year of payments goes through that properly, and APPLE.COM/BILL is the same problem in Apple's version.
If you are here because the total has crept up rather than because of one charge, finding all your subscriptions at once is the pass worth doing instead: a year of payments, grouped by who you paid, with everything that appears in three months or more read twice.
When the company will not let you cancel, the payment can be stopped at the bank instead. In the UK the FCA is explicit that this is your right and not a favour: “Once you've asked them to, your card issuer must stop the payments – even if you haven't contacted the business,” and “Your card issuer can't insist that you contact the business before stopping the payment.” The deadline is the end of the business day before the next payment is due.
And here is the part that catches people. Stopping the payment is not the same as ending the agreement. The FCA puts it plainly: “Cancelling a recurring card payment does not necessarily end your contract with a business. It will still be your responsibility to pay any money that you owe under a contract.” So the debt can carry on after the payments stop, which is how a cancelled card turns into a letter from a collection agency.
Two things worth knowing alongside it. Payments taken after you cancel are “considered to be unauthorised transactions”, and the issuer “must refund these payments and any related charges immediately”. And a recurring card payment is not a direct debit: the FCA says it is “not covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee”, and a new card does not reliably stop one.
In the euro area the equivalent is the direct-debit refund, and the European Commission's own example is this exact situation: a contract cancelled, the direct debit taken anyway. You have the right to get that payment refunded within eight weeks, for direct debits at home and across the EU.
The EU's cooling-off period is often reached for at this point and it is not the right tool. It is a right to withdraw from a contract “within 14 days without providing any justification”, counted for services from “the day the contract was agreed”. That makes it a start-of-contract right rather than a way out of something you have been paying for since March.
It also has holes worth knowing before you rely on it. Digital content you chose to start straight away is excluded, as are tickets and hotel bookings for specific dates, personalised goods, and services already fully delivered where you agreed to begin immediately.
Where the company's own process has steps worth knowing in advance, there is a page for it here: what it costs to leave early, what notice it wants, and how to check afterwards that it actually stopped.
Mind My Money goes through a year of your own payments on your own computer, groups them by who you paid, and names the ones your statement only labels with a processor. The recurring ones come to you one at a time, with what each has cost you over the year.
The ones you say no to, it cancels in a browser while you watch, and then it checks the account page afterwards to see that the cancellation took. That last step is the one people skip, and it is where a cancellation that did not work turns up.
Runs on your own computer. Pay what you decide, including nothing.