Costloop
Subscription and recurring cost tracker for freelancers and
Six months ago I started building CostLoop - a SaaS subscription and renewal tracker for small businesses. No coding background. Built everything with Claude Code.
The problem I kept hearing from small business owners and agency founders was always the same: "I have no idea what we're actually paying for software each month." The biggest barrier to getting started was always manual entry - nobody wants to sit down and type in 30 subscriptions from scratch. So we just shipped two features that eliminate that problem completely:
1. Email Scanner (Chrome extension) Install → connect Gmail or Outlook via OAuth (read-only) → click scan. CostLoop scans 12 months of billing emails, finds every subscription, and imports them directly into your dashboard with service name, cost, and billing date.
2. Bank Statement Upload Drag in your PDF bank statement and CostLoop automatically detects all recurring charges and imports them. Both features are part of CostLoop - free to start at costloop.app.
Where we are:
- Product live at costloop.app
- Chrome extension just approved and live
- Solo founder, Oslo Norway
- Zero to early users stage
- Building in public
The whole point is that setup now takes 2 minutes instead of 20 - connect your inbox, scan, done.
Every subscription you're paying for is in one place with renewal reminders firing automatically before anything charges.Would love honest feedback - especially if the subscription detection misses something or imports incorrectly.
Try it free: costloop.app
The spreadsheet we were using to track subscriptions kept going stale.
Every few months, someone would join the team and sign up for a tool without adding it to the spreadsheet. Every few months, someone would leave and their tools would quietly keep charging. Annual renewals would hit without anyone having reviewed them first.
After finding roughly $600/month in unnecessary charges during a quarterly audit — tools we weren't using, seats we didn't need, duplicates from a migration we thought we'd completed — I decided to build a proper solution.
What CostLoop does:
- Track every subscription with its owner, cost, renewal date, and status
- Send renewal reminders 14 days before charges happen
- Store cancellation links alongside each tool (so acting on a reminder takes 2 clicks)
- Log invoices, contracts, and notes per subscription
- Show monthly spend totals and annual forecasts
- Flag unused seats and duplicate tools
No bank connection required. Manual entry only — which means the data is accurate because you put it there intentionally.
What I've learned building it:
The hardest thing wasn't the product — it was convincing people the problem was real enough to solve with a tool rather than a spreadsheet. Most teams don't feel the pain until they've done a proper audit and seen the number. After the audit, the need is obvious.
The "no bank connection" decision was intentional. A lot of subscription trackers try to auto-import from your bank, which sounds convenient but creates its own problems: the data is messy, categorization is wrong, and people are understandably reluctant to connect their business banking to a startup tool. Manual entry is slower but it gives you a list you can actually trust.
Where it's at:
Free tier with full features for the first 10 subscriptions. Paid tiers for larger subscription lists and team features.
I'd love to hear from people who've tried to solve this with spreadsheets — what worked, what broke down, what you wish you'd had. And if you want to try it: costloop.app, no credit card required.
What does your team currently use to track SaaS spend?
Try CostLoop free at costloop.app — no credit card required. Happy to answer any questions.
Hey IH,
Sharing CostLoop (https://costloop.app) - a subscription management app for small businesses and freelancers.
The problem: no central view of software spend. Renewals happen unnoticed. Seats stay active after people leave. Nobody saves the cancellation URL.
What it does:
One dashboard for every subscription
Email alerts before each renewal (7, 14, or 30 days)
Cancellation links stored per tool
Health score flagging unused seats and duplicates
CSV import, multi-currency, team workspaces
Biggest learning so far: users who import their full stack activate and retain far better than those who add a few subscriptions manually. The CSV import moved that needle significantly.
Useful reads from our blog:
How to do a SaaS audit: https://costloop.app/blog/saas-audit-small-business
Why spreadsheets fail at this: https://costloop.app/blog/subscription-management-spreadsheet
Free to start at https://costloop.app. Happy to swap notes.
I'm not guessing.
The average small business has 3–5 "zombie" subscriptions quietly charging every month - software nobody uses, a seat for someone who left, a trial that converted silently.
Here's how it usually goes:
💸 The invoice lands in someone's inbox
💸 "We'll deal with it later."
💸 It auto-renews. Again.
It's not carelessness - it's just that there's never been one place to track it all.
That's exactly why we built CostLoop.
One dashboard for every subscription, renewal date, and cancellation link your business has.
Free to start. No credit card needed.
https://costloop.app
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1
The pain is real, especially for small businesses where subscriptions are spread across email inboxes, cards, trials, former employees, and tools nobody owns anymore.
The strongest positioning angle may not be “save money on unused subscriptions.” That is useful, but also a bit narrow. The bigger angle is control over recurring business spend: what renews, who owns it, what can be cancelled, and what silently keeps charging.
CostLoop is clear, but I would be careful if the product expands beyond cost tracking into approvals, renewal workflows, ownership, alerts, and finance operations. The name may start to feel more like a spend-saving utility than a broader subscription control platform.
If you are still early, Xevoa .com would be worth pressure-testing as a cleaner product brand because it can carry subscriptions, workflows, approvals, renewals, and business spend operations without boxing the product only into “cost.”
1 Comment
The auto-import is a great feature, but notice what it actually is: the scan is not onboarding, it is the hook, because the result of the scan is the fear. "Connect your Gmail, see everything you are paying for" lands so hard because the reveal is a gut-punch, the person discovers they are paying for 34 tools and forgot 6 of them. Lead with that moment: not "subscription tracker," but "in 2 minutes, see the number you have been avoiding."
That reveal is also your growth loop, because the shock number is exactly what people screenshot and repeat. So make the scan produce a shareable result, a subscription audit with a total, and every new user becomes a story their founder friends hear. The import gets them in the door. Then the thing that keeps them is the pre-charge alert, "Adobe renews in 3 days for $660," because the scan is a one-time wow and the renewal warning is the recurring reason to stay. Scan for acquisition, alert for retention, do not blur the two.
And to your feedback ask: detection accuracy on the first scan is the entire activation, because a scan that misses subscriptions or imports wrong charges breaks the "2 minutes, done" promise at the exact moment you made it. Get the first scan almost perfect before anything else, because the first run is where you win or lose the user.