Frequently asked questions

No. Create an account and you are in. There is no application, no waitlist, and nobody reviewing anything. The only requirement is a verified email address, which is part of signing up.

Four specific things. Anyone can join. The Free plan needs no card — upload statements and LowScout shows what you’re committed to, what’s coming up and what changed; Plus ($8.99/month) adds continuous bank monitoring if you want it. Screens and features will change while you use it. And some things are unfinished — which we name on this page rather than let you discover. What does not change: every number is computed from your own data, your uploads stay private, and we never claim a cancellation succeeded that we cannot prove.

Yes. The Free plan is free and needs no card, so nothing can start charging you. Plus is an optional $8.99/month upgrade for continuous bank monitoring — you only pay if you choose it, and you can cancel anytime from your billing settings.

That is genuinely your call, and the demo exists so you can decide with your eyes open — it runs on sample data and shows exactly what you would get. What we can tell you: you sign in with your password, a one-time code sent to your verified email address, or your Google account, files are checked for malware and stored encrypted in private storage, the amounts and merchants in them never appear in our logs, your statements are never shared, sold, or used to train AI models, and you can delete all of it yourself from Settings at any time.

Neither, exactly. It is a control center for your recurring money: what you’re committed to each month, what’s expected in the next 7 and 30 days, what changed, where a review may be worth it, and whether a charge came back after you cancelled. Subscriptions are the most common case, but any charge that repeats counts. It does not track every dollar you spend, categorize your purchases, detect your income, or run a budget — and it will not claim to until it truthfully can.

Only if you choose to. There are two equal ways in: connect a bank or card account through Plaid — read-only transaction access, where you sign in at your bank’s own flow and LowScout never receives or stores your bank username or password — or download a statement (PDF or CSV) from your bank’s website and upload the file. Both feed the same analysis. Connecting asks for its own separate consent, syncs periodically rather than in real time, and can be disconnected at any time, which also deletes the transactions it imported.

No — and that is by design, not a missing feature. It guides you: reviewed step-by-step instructions for the specific merchant where we have them, an honest general path where we do not. You perform the cancellation; LowScout never contacts the merchant and never signs in to your accounts.

We never claim it worked. When you mark a cancellation done it shows as "Marked canceled by you" — your word, honestly labelled. As later statements arrive, LowScout checks them for another charge: if one appears after you marked it canceled, it shows as "Still charging". If none appears, it says so — no later charge seen — but a missing charge is not proof the subscription ended, so LowScout never calls it verified.

Computed, always. Every total — monthly, yearly, per-charge — is exact arithmetic over the statements you uploaded or the accounts you connected. Nothing is rounded up or invented, and each charge shows the evidence it was built from. The one place you will see an estimate is “Coming up”: the next 7 and 30 days are projected from each charge’s established billing rhythm and are labeled as estimates, never as due dates.

Statement formats vary a lot by bank, and coverage is honest work in progress. If a PDF fails, try your bank’s CSV export — and if the columns are unusual, you can point out which is which yourself. Every failure shows a plain reason and a support reference; sending us that reference with your bank’s name is the fastest way to get that bank supported.

The audit itself is fully deterministic — no AI is involved in finding charges or computing totals. There is an optional AI-summary feature that is switched off for now; we will not turn it on until our AI provider’s data terms meet the bar we have set: no retention of your data, and no training on it. When it does arrive it is opt-in behind its own consent, it only ever receives derived facts (merchant names, amounts, cadence — never your uploaded documents), and every figure it states is checked against your own numbers before you see it.

Spending categories and trends across all your transactions, income or paycheck detection, budgets and safe-to-spend figures, an emailed monthly report, self-serve data export (deletion is self-serve today; a copy of your data is still sent by a person), the AI summary (off, above), and native mobile apps (the web app is responsive). Everything on that list is either planned and labelled, or openly undecided.

They are checked for malware on upload, stored encrypted in private storage that nothing can read without a short-lived link tied to your account, and turned into your transactions and audit. They are never shared, never sold, and never used to train AI models.

LowScout is a one-person company. There is no admin screen that shows your audit. Support diagnosis works from the reference shown on error screens, which points at logs that contain no financial values by design. The founder does have direct database access — someone has to run the service — and uses it for an individual account only when diagnosing a problem you have reported. Aggregate reporting is counts only: no amounts, no merchant names, no file names.

You verify your email address when you sign up, and you sign in with your password, a one-time code sent to that address, or your Google account. That is one check, not two-factor authentication: LowScout does not currently offer an authenticator app or any other second factor. A LowScout account can show someone a map of your recurring finances, so use a password you do not use anywhere else, and turn on two-step verification with your email provider or on your Google account — that is the strongest protection available today. You can manage your password, email addresses and connected accounts in Settings → Account & security.

No advertising pixels on any page you see while signed in, and no session recording on any signed-in page — financial screens are never replayed. That is an architectural rule in this codebase, not a preference. Product analytics is a small, fixed list of events carrying counts and category codes only: no amounts, no merchant names, no file names, no free-form text.

Yes, yourself, right now. Go to Settings → Delete account: it cancels any paid subscription, ends any connected bank connections, and permanently deletes your uploaded files, everything computed from them, and your account. What remains afterwards is a single anonymous record that a deletion happened — it contains no personal data.

Yes — email us and we will send it within the same window. A self-serve export button is not built yet, and we would rather say so than let you hunt for it in settings.

Email us. Anything involving your account or your data goes there, and you will get a first reply within two business days. Anything that looks like a wrong number, a privacy problem, or a security issue gets same-day attention — say so in the subject and it jumps the queue.

To us, yes — it is the most serious class of bug this product can have. A figure that does not match your statement, or a cancellation shown as ended when the charge is still coming, stops other work the day it is reported. Please tell us, with the reference from the error screen if there was one.

LowScout Plus is $8.99/month for continuous bank monitoring; the Free plan stays free. We do not sell data, we do not run ads, and we have no advertising business to feed — which is exactly why the privacy rules above can be as strict as they are.

No. LowScout does arithmetic on your statements and connected accounts and shows you what recurs, what’s coming, and what changed. What to do about it is your call, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Your account, your uploads, and your audit carry over — nothing resets and nothing is deleted. The Free plan stays free; you are never charged unless you choose to upgrade to Plus.

It is a one-person company, so it is a fair question. The commitment: 30 days’ notice by email, an export of your data on request during that window, and deletion of everything afterwards. We would rather write that down now than improvise it later.