SUBTRACKED
Transforming Subscription Management in the Canadian FinTech Space
Finance for Canadians
Users face challenges tracking multiple subscriptions across varied billing cycles, resulting in financial disorganization. Key pain points include:
- Forgetting payment deadlines.
- Difficulty canceling or pausing subscriptions.
- Lack of visibility into the financial impact of recurring payments.
and Market Gaps
User Interviews
I conducted Zoom interviews with Canadians (18+) managing household bills. While I initially hypothesized a need for full bill management, research revealed they struggled mainly with tracking smaller, variable payments like subscriptions. This new insight led me to pivot the project toward a mobile-first subscription tracker with clear analytics and simple controls.
Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis of Bobby Subscription Tracking, Buddy Budget Planner, and Sub Manager revealed gaps in subscription control, payment integration, and analytics—key opportunities for SubTracked to differentiate
User Personas
I created user personas - informed by feedback from user interviews - to guide key design decisions:
- The Budget-Conscious Planner – Tracks and minimizes subscriptions to stay within budget.
- The Busy Subscription Hopper – Juggles multiple subscriptions and needs easy tracking and cancellations.
- The Financially Overwhelmed User – Seeks clarity and control through automated insights and spending breakdowns
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Management
Adopting a lean UX process, I collaborated closely with full-stack developers from the project’s inception to ensure feasibility and efficiency of my design solutions . SubTracked addresses both user pain points by focusing on:
- Seamless Subscription Tracking – A unified dashboard provides a clear overview of active subscriptions, billing dates, and payment sources, reducing confusion and missed deadlines.
- Effortless Cancellations & Pauses – Integrated APIs and direct service links allow users to pause or cancel subscriptions instantly, addressing the frustration of complex cancellation processes.
- Granular Spending Insights - Customizable dashboards visualize subscription spending, helping users adjust budgets.
Difference
To highlight SubTracked's competitive advantage, I conducted a comparison of key screens and user flows against major players in the subscription management space.
- A Smarter Home Screen - SubTracked’s dashboard prioritizes key and time-sensitive information, such as upcoming payments, ensuring users stay on top of their subscriptions. It is designed to align with user needs and the app’s core functionality. Additionally, expenditures are front and center, allowing users to easily track their financial activity. In contrast, competitor home screens bury financial details making it more difficult to monitor spending and payment deadlines effectively.
- Seamless Subscription Management - Subtracked offers a convenient upload process, allowing users to import subscriptions from multiple sources, including bank accounts, iCloud, and credit cards. Competitors, on the other hand, either provide a limited list of supported vendors or rely solely on manual entry, making the process more time-consuming and less efficient. See figure 7.
- Comprehensive Financial Analytics – SubTracked provides detailed financial insights, allowing users to view monthly, yearly, and custom dashboards while drilling down into specific spending categories for a deeper understanding of their expenses. In contrast, key competitors offer a high-level financial overview with limited drill-down capabilities, restricting users’ ability to analyze and optimize their spending effectively. See figure 8.
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Leverage Competitor Gaps - Identifying opportunities for differentiation drove the creation of unique, high-value features.
Iterate Quickly, Learn Faster - A lean UX process enabled efficient testing and refinement, delivering a user-centered product within tight timelines.
SubTracked exemplifies how user research, rapid iteration, and strategic differentiation can align user needs with business objectives, paving the way for impactful digital products.