Now, before I start I want to just explain something about Dropbox. I love Dropbox. I think it’s an awesome product and I continue to use it today. How I signed up to it and ended up using it, is the story I want to tell you.
I have a graphic design business and as part of that business we use a project management tool called Redbooth. You may have heard of it.
We were in the process of setting up some online forms for our website. The forms were for our customers. They could submit details of their order requirements through simple drop down boxes and tick boxes, and then upload any other items such as images and copy.
The intent of these forms was to automatically pass through all the details to Redbooth, create a task for one of our staff and attach any files ready for that staff member to access.
This is where Dropbox came in.
I signed up to a 30 day free trial and I was required to enter my credit card details… the 30 day trial expired and just like that, $850 got taken from my credit card!
We successfully set up the automation but we needed a cloud based file storage platform that could easily share between our website and the Redbooth platform. Researching the available options, Dropbox looked to be the answer.
I signed up to Dropbox Business 30 day trial and I was required to enter my credit card details. No worries – $70 per month – If this all works as it should I would have no issues paying that.
Having signed up, I got straight into it over the next few days working on our automation.
And then I got distracted. Work got busy, life got busy and I stopped working on the automation stuff for the next few weeks.
You’re probably thinking now – “I know where this story is going…”
Yep, sure enough, the 30 day trial expired and boom! Just like that, $850 got taken from my credit card!
As you can imagine I was ‘upset’. Not at Dropbox, but upset with myself for letting myself forget about the subscription I had set myself up for and then failed to manage it like any good business person should.
A couple of things happened as a result of this:
1. I immediately found the time to get back on my form automation. I’d paid for Dropbox so now I wanted to get it working so I could take advantage of it. Thankfully Dropbox worked perfectly and was okay. Phew!
2. I decided to dig through my credit card statement and accounts to see what other subscriptions I was paying for that I had also managed to forget about.
I found $215 worth of subscriptions I was paying for every month – that I didn’t want!
I was upset before, but now I was furious! I’d been throwing this money away on stuff I wasn’t using for months! And it was my own fault! As you’re probably aware when you’re just starting out, every dollar counts. To realise I’d given away over $1,000 because I’d failed to keep track of my subscriptions was a real wake up call.
Once I calmed down (I may have had a glass of wine or two) I was determined that this wouldn’t happen to me again.
The first thing I did was cancel the stuff I didn’t need – easy.
The second thing I did was set up a spreadsheet to start tracking all of my subscriptions.
This is where the technical side of me got involved and I started playing with the spreadsheet – making formulas, putting charts together to see how much I was paying over the year. I set it up to show how much per month and which months were my large months. The problem was the spreadsheet didn’t remind me when they were due. I would still forget about them.
So I then went through and got all the expiry dates for each subscription and entered them in my calendar as recurring appointments, setting a reminder for 3 days prior. Done.
After going through all of this, (and spending a few days developing the spreadsheet) I thought, “there has to be a better way!”
This is where TrackMySubs was born.
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