Terma vs. Rocket Money vs. Bobby: Which Subscription Tracker Is Right for You?

"Subscription tracker" describes three fairly different products once you look past the category label. Some detect your subscriptions automatically by reading your bank transactions. Some ask you to enter everything by hand and deliberately stay away from your accounts entirely. Some sit in between — reading a receipt or a contract instead of a bank feed, so you get automatic data extraction without handing over banking access. None of these approaches is wrong; they're different trade-offs between convenience and what you share to get it. Here's how three real examples of each actually compare.

The three approaches

Rocket Money links directly to your bank and card accounts (via a third-party connection service, the way most budgeting apps do) and scans your real transaction history to detect recurring charges automatically, including ones you forgot about entirely. It can also attempt to cancel or negotiate some bills on your behalf. That automatic detection is genuinely powerful — it will surface a forgotten charge you'd never have thought to enter manually. The trade-off is the access it needs to do that: a live, ongoing connection to your actual bank and card accounts, handled through a third-party financial data aggregator. Its free tier is limited, with the fuller feature set behind a variable, user-set subscription price.

Bobby takes the opposite position: everything is entered by hand, nothing ever connects to a bank account, and the app has historically been sold as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription — a deliberate, almost ideological choice for a subscription-tracking app not to become one itself. It's simple, private by design, and asks nothing of your financial accounts. The trade-off is that it only knows what you tell it, and it has historically been iOS/Mac-only, so it's not an option if your phone runs Android.

Terma sits between the two: no bank connection, ever — instead, you scan a receipt, a contract, or a confirmation email, and AI extracts the price, renewal date, and cancellation terms for you, so entry is close to automatic without ever linking a financial account. It runs cross-platform (Android and the web today), keeps your data local-first on your own device by default, and adds features aimed specifically at the parts of subscription management that are easy to miss — cancellation notice periods, calendar reminders before a renewal, and looking up whether a price you're being charged matches what the provider actually lists.

Which one actually fits you

If you want the most automatic possible detection and you're comfortable linking your bank accounts to a third-party service to get it, Rocket Money's bank-feed approach will surface things a manual app never will. If you want the opposite — zero financial-account access, ever, at the cost of typing things in yourself — Bobby's manual, one-time-purchase model is a genuinely well-built option, provided you're on iOS or Mac.

None of this is really a competition with one winner. It's three different answers to "how much access am I willing to trade for how much automation," and the honest answer is that the right app depends entirely on where you land on that trade-off — not on which one has the longer feature list.