Trim seeks out and destroys awful monthly subscriptions

In the age of Netflix, Spotify, and unwanted LinkedIn Premium subscriptions, it can be difficult to keep track of where your money is going on a monthly basis. Trim, a San Francisco startup from former venture capitalists Thomas Smyth and Dan Petkevich, wants to ensure you never end up paying for something you don't need or remember signing up for. The free web service, which launched last month, lets you plug in your credit card and phone number to receive a text message that day relaying all of your various subscriptions. A text reply lets you cancel any of them without having to go through the process yourself.

Trim's founders say the company works with 98 percent of US banking institutions. So you can sign up with a card from Chase, Bank of America, and American Express, but also community and regional banks as well as credit unions. Once you create a profile and link your credit card account, Trim will analyze your purchase history for the past 90 days and determine which items were recurring favorites, like a morning coffee or bagel, and which were actual monthly subscriptions.

To remove a subscription, you text the word cancel next to its name, and Trim will contact the company. "For most billers, we’re able to unsubscribe directly with just an email," Smyth says. "Some billers will still make you call them, so we developed a system to automate that as best as you can." Smyth says some bills, like "heinous gym memberships," require cancellation in person or by mail. So Smyth says Trim will actually send a certified mail letter to deal with those more outlandish cases. One of the most common cases, Trim says, is credit reporting service from companies like Experian that sneak in small monthly charges after you sign up.

Trim isn't perfect, but it can learn

In my experience, Trim was able to identify every subscription on my Chase card, which I use for the bulk of my monthly expenses. Because I tend to be an obsessive Mint user, I wasn't too surprised by any one charge, but it was a reminder of how many automated bills I pay ever month and at what cost. Trim did misidentify two separate haircut purchases at the same location as a subscription because of the identical flat fee. When I asked it to cancel — to test its limitations — Trim was able to correct the purchases as stand-alone items. So it's not perfect, but it can learn. To get the full experience, I also asked Trim to cancel my New York Times digital subscription, which I know from past experience requires a phone call, though it may take Trim up to a week to complete the cancellation.

The choice to create a web service and not a mobile app was a concerted effort to keep Trim narrow and focused. "There aren’t a whole lot of bells and whistles we’d be tempted to add with an app," Smyth says. The duo think over-complicating Trim will turn off users who only want a quick snapshot of their subscription bills, and they're both "really excited about the text interface" as a way to get users trying it without having to download something. Granted, that means you aren't pinged on a regular basis through an app notification. Trim is designed at the moment to be used only when you feel like it, so you have to input your credit card account info whenever you want a new update.

Trim has to figure out how to make money

Of course, this setup doesn't leave the startup too many ways to make money. Smyth and Petkevich have subsisted thus far on a small group of angel investors. That includes money from Core Innovation Capital, where Smyth used to work as a venture capitalist with a focus on financial tech. The long-term goal is to evolve Trim into a kind of Mint 2.0, where you'll be able to keep track of finances and see intelligent ways to cut costs instead of just observing — and sometimes regretting — what you spend money on.

Petkevich says an ideal version of Trim would find cheaper alternatives to the items you spend money on regularly, and that may be something users may pay for in the form of a Trim Premium. "The way that people have been thinking about personal finance in the past is budgeting tools — you go to Mint and you arrange your budget and it tells you how much you spent," he says. "We come at it from a different angle: how can we help you optimize your financial life with concrete actions?"