Why does the tracker need three databases instead of one?

Three databases separate concerns: Subscriptions database holds what you pay for and when, Months database holds time periods, and bridge database relates them. This separation makes formulas easier to maintain. When you add new subscription, you don't risk breaking formulas in the Months database. Formulas in bridge and Months databases stay stable because they reference consistent structure from Subscriptions database.

What happens when I change a subscription status to finished?

An automation can automatically set the end date to today when status changes to finished. This prevents the subscription from counting toward future month costs. Without this automation, you'd need to manually enter end date each time, creating extra work and risk of forgotten dates.

Can I use this tracker on Notion's free plan?

Yes, you can build the tracker structure on free plan. However, free plan allows only one automation, which limits real-time updates. You can create the automation to auto-set end dates, but you cannot add additional automations for other tasks. Paid plans (Business or Plus) allow multiple automations, making workflow smoother.

How often does the tracker update with new costs?

Formulas recalculate whenever you edit any property in linked databases. Automations trigger on specific events (like status change). So tracker updates immediately when you add new subscription or change dates. However, Notion doesn't push updates in real time—tracker only recalculates when you manually edit or automation triggers. Dedicated subscription-tracking apps update automatically after each expense.

How to Build a Subscription Tracker in Notion

Where This Subscription Tracker Template Comes From

The template here ships inside Notion Second Brain 6.0, the finance brain that tracks income, expenses, balance, savings, debts, and subscriptions with roughly 90% of the math automated. You can buy it on its own for $59, or get it free as part of Second Brain 6.0. If you already run your finances in Notion, the bundled path costs nothing extra.

Core Database Structure You’ll Need

An automated subscription tracker in Notion runs on three connected databases: one for subscriptions, one for months, and a bridge that acts as the relation hub between them. Splitting subscription definitions (what you pay for) from time-based tracking (when each payment lands) keeps the formulas readable. Add a new subscription and nothing downstream breaks, because each database has exactly one job.

Subscription Entry Properties

Each subscription entry needs five properties before the formulas and automations have anything to work with. Miss one and some calculation quietly returns blank.

Status takes one of three values: not started, active, or finished. It decides whether a subscription counts toward your current costs. Finished ones stay in the database for history but drop out of the math.

Original payment date marks when the subscription began. Every cycle count starts from this date.

Cost is the amount charged per billing cycle.

Recurring interval is month, quarter, or year, and it sets how the next payment date gets calculated.

End date records when a finished subscription stopped. An automation can fill this in for you.

Formulas That Power the Tracker

Notion pulls each subscription’s cost into a month with a formula-based lookup, not a database relation. The costs get calculated on demand rather than stored, which is what keeps the tracker current without a manual refresh.

Last payment formula. If the subscription is active, it counts the billing cycles elapsed since the original start date to find the most recent charge. If it’s finished, it locks to the end date instead. The question it answers: as of today, when did this last charge?

Next payment formula. It adds one cycle (month, quarter, or year) to the last payment date and shows when the next charge hits. Finished subscriptions display “subscription not active” rather than a future date.

Month formula. For each month in the tracker, it checks whether the subscription’s payment date already fell inside that month. Only the ones that have passed their payment date count toward that month’s total.

Month subscription cost formula. It sums the costs of every subscription that is both active and past its payment date for that month, reaching through the bridge relation to pull the numbers from the Subscriptions database.

Setting Up Automations

Notion automations fill fields and fire actions when a property changes. The free plan gives you one automation; Business and Plus plans give you more. That single-automation cap is the first wall you hit on free, and it shapes how much of this tracker can update on its own.

The most useful one: when you flip a subscription’s status to “finished,” the automation stamps the end date to today. That stops finished subscriptions from bleeding into future months without you typing a date every time.

A known bug, and the fix. Notion’s recurring page creation has a quirk. Auto-created pages don’t pick up their formula-based name (a formatted date, for example) at creation, so the name appears only after you manually edit a property, which leaves scheduled pages sitting there undated. The workaround is to trigger the automation on “any property edited” instead of page creation alone, so recurring pages rename themselves the moment anything touches them.

Where Notion Trackers Run Out of Road

A Notion tracker handles simple cases fine, but the friction it adds is exactly what a dedicated app strips out. You maintain formulas by hand across three databases. On the free plan, one automation caps how much updates in real time, so the tracker sits on stale numbers until you edit a property or fire the action yourself.

Doing this manually means every new subscription is another round of formula upkeep and another check that the month math still lines up. Picture the same task with none of that: you add the subscription once and see, immediately, what it does to the money you can actually spend this week.

That is what Dzing computes: a transparent safe-to-spend number built from your planned operations (salary, subscriptions, bills, one-off expenses), with the full formula breakdown visible. Change a subscription and it recalculates what’s left. It also handles multiple accounts across currencies, budgets and savings goals that feed the same number, and spending history you can read for patterns.

Here is the honest limit. Dzing has no bank sync: every entry is manual by design, and it never touches your real money. If automatic transaction imports are what you’re after, this is the wrong tool. But if you want to know what’s safe to spend after the subscriptions come out, entering them once and watching one number move beats debugging three databases.