Meet Suby, the agent that can actually see your subscriptions
A general chatbot can explain what a subscription is. Suby knows what yours cost, when they renew, and can open the right screen for you — without being allowed to touch anything on its own.
6 min read
Hey — I'm Suby. Your subscriptions agent.
Every app has an assistant now, and most of them are a text box in front of a model that knows nothing about you. Suby is the opposite bet: a small agent that knows one subject very well — your subscriptions — and is deliberately not allowed to know anything else.
What Suby does
It walks you up a ladder, and the ladder is real
Five rungs: connect an account, scan it, review what came back, understand what you are spending, act on it. Which rung you are on is computed from the state of your account — how many sources are connected, how many subscriptions exist, how many findings you have not looked at yet, how many you have cancelled. It is not counted from how many times you opened the app, which is the usual trick and the one that makes these things feel like a slot machine.
You can ask it things
In plain English, about your own list: what renews this week, what the monthly total actually comes to, which of these you have not used.
It answers with buttons, not instructions
When the right response is "go look at this", you get a chip that opens the screen. When it is "you probably want this gone", you get a chip that offers to remove it — and the app asks you to confirm before anything goes.
The part that matters: what it is not allowed to do
This is where an agent either earns trust or quietly loses it.
It never acts
The model proposes, the app offers, the person taps. Nothing it says cancels or deletes anything by itself.
It cannot invent a target
Every subscription id it returns is checked against the rows you actually own. A hallucinated id becomes no action rather than an action on somebody else's subscription.
It can only do three things
Open one of three screens, show the details of one subscription, or offer to remove one. A closed list, not a free-form instruction — because everything reaching the model is text somebody else wrote, including the names of merchants. A company that renamed itself to ignore previous instructions must not be able to widen what the answer is allowed to contain.
It is told very little
Names, prices, billing periods, renewal dates. That is the entire briefing. No email bodies, no statement lines, no bank descriptors, no address, no transaction history.
It never invents a number
It adds up only what is in front of it, and it says which period it used. If the list does not say something, the answer is that it does not know.
So why not just use ChatGPT
Honestly: for most questions, do use it. It is better than Suby at everything that is not your subscription list. The difference is narrow and it is the whole point.
| A general chatbot | Suby | |
|---|---|---|
| Knows what you pay for | only if you type it all in | reads your own list |
| Can open the right screen | no | yes, one tap |
| Can act on a subscription | no | proposes; you confirm |
| What it sees of your data | whatever you paste — often a whole statement | names, prices, dates. Nothing else |
| Making up a total | will do it confidently | adds only what is listed, names the period |
| Everything else in life | far better | will tell you it does not know |
The honest summary: a general model is a brilliant stranger. Suby is a narrow one that has read exactly one page about you, can prove where every number came from, and is not allowed to touch anything without being asked twice.
Where it is today
Suby is in testing. The character, the ladder and the greeting are in the app; being able to type a question at it is switched on for internal accounts while we are sure the fence around it holds.
We would rather ship an assistant that answers one thing truthfully than one that promises to help with anything and then does not.
More in Using SubSSwitch
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Bank connection, mailbox scan, statement upload. They find different things, and the overlap is smaller than you would expect.
What your bank statement will not tell you
Merchant descriptors are written by the acquirer, not the brand. That is why a service you know appears under a name you have never seen.
Rotation, not cancellation
You do not need four streaming services at once. You need one at a time, in the right order, and something that remembers to switch.