I built Trial Tracker because I was tired of forgetting free trials

The pain is real. The product only wins if adding a trial is faster than a calendar reminder. If I have to create an account and fill five fields before the first trial is logged, I’ll leave. What’s the first screen after signup?

Honestly, I think the biggest issue is probably remembering to add the trial in the first place

The whole reason people need this is because they forget things, so asking them to manually log every trial might be fighting the problem a little. If there was a way to automatically pick up new trials, I’d definitely use it.

Really like the simplicity of the idea though. It solves a very specific and annoying problem.

The habit gap is the real challenge here — the person most likely to forget to cancel a trial is also the least likely to remember to open a tracker. That's the core UX problem to solve before worrying about features.

On distribution: skip the launch blast and go directly to people who've complained about unexpected subscription charges on Twitter/X or Reddit in the last 3-6 months. They already know the pain. Ten real conversations like that will tell you whether friction is forgetting to add trials, forgetting to check, or something else entirely.

One thing worth obsessing over: make the renewal reminder feel genuinely alarming — specific product name, exact cost, days left. That notification is your main reason for existing and your best daily re-engagement hook. If it doesn't make someone immediately open the app, it isn't doing its job.

The manual entry problem is bigger than the reminder problem. I'd start with a browser extension that recognizes a checkout or trial confirmation page. It can fill in the service and renewal date, then ask the user to confirm with one click. That's much simpler than asking for inbox access. It also prevents most cases where users forget to log the subscription later. If they still don't confirm it right away, you'll know the automation needs to go further before you spend more time polishing the dashboard.

Gregory's inbox-scanning point is the real fix, but I'd add: even automatic detection doesn't solve the second, harder problem — most trial confirmation emails don't state the price you'll actually be charged. They say "your trial ends on X," not "you'll be charged $49 on X." So an inbox scanner tells you a date exists, but not whether it's worth caring about.

Which might actually simplify the product: skip trying to extract price/terms reliably from parsing (that's a losing battle across hundreds of email formats) and instead have people confirm the few dollar amounts that matter — the $50+ trials — while auto-detecting everything else just for the date. Most of a person's forgotten-trial anxiety is concentrated in a handful of expensive ones, not the free Notion plugin they signed up for.

The structural problem is that the user who forgets a trial is the same user who will not remember to log it, so manual entry fights the exact behavior you are selling against. Every tracker in this category that got traction solved it by reading a data source instead: bank feed, card transactions, or the confirmation emails already sitting in the inbox. I would test an inbox-scanning version that finds trial signups automatically before spending another week on the dashboard.

The second question is the one I’d be most curious about too. There’s a big difference between finding this useful and remembering to use it every time a new trial starts.