Most subscription trackers fail at the same moment: setup. If getting to a useful state takes an evening, it joins the pile of apps you opened twice. So we designed WinnowFi's first session to fit in 15 minutes — and this post walks through exactly how to spend them.

Here's the clock.

Minutes 0–2: Sign up and pick your lane

Create your account — free, no credit card. You have two ways to use WinnowFi:

Free plan: track up to 3 subscriptions manually. No bank connection needed. A good fit if you just want renewal alerts on your biggest recurring charges.
Premium ($5.99/month or $59.99/year): connect your bank account and let detection find every recurring charge automatically — including the quarterly and annual ones nobody remembers.

One more thing before you move on: enable two-factor authentication in your security settings. It takes a minute, and an app that knows about your finances deserves more than a password.

Minutes 2–5: Connect your bank (Premium)

Bank connections run through Plaid, the same connectivity service used across the fintech industry. Two things worth knowing about what happens here:

You log in with your bank, not with us. Authentication happens inside Plaid's secure widget. WinnowFi never sees or stores your bank credentials.
Access is read-only. We can see transaction data to detect recurring charges; we cannot move money, ever. The access token itself is encrypted at rest on our side.

Once connected, the detection engine starts working through your transaction history for recurring patterns — the same temporal, merchant, and amount analysis we described in how our detection works.

Minutes 5–10: Confirm and dismiss

This is the most valuable five minutes of the whole setup. Detection surfaces what it found, and high-confidence matches are joined by "possible subscriptions" — charges that look recurring but need your judgment.

Go through the list and do two things:

Confirm the real ones. Each confirmation builds your subscription list with a verified name, price, and billing cycle.
Dismiss the false positives — that recurring transfer to your savings account isn't a subscription. Dismissals matter as much as confirmations: they're the signal we use to measure and improve detection precision.

Don't be surprised if something in this list makes you wince. Finding a charge you'd forgotten about is the product working, not failing.

Minutes 10–13: Add what a bank feed can't see

Some subscriptions won't appear in the connected account: services billed to a different card, an account you share, or something a family member pays for. Add those manually so your list is complete. On the free plan, this is your whole workflow — spend your 3 slots on your biggest recurring charges, where a renewal alert is worth the most.

Minutes 13–15: Read your number

At the top of the dashboard sits your monthly total — every confirmed subscription, with annual and quarterly plans converted to their monthly equivalent. Before you look, guess the number. Research we've cited before (C+R Research, 2024) found the average household guesses $86 when the real figure is $273. Seeing your own gap between guess and reality is the moment this stops being abstract.

What happens after the 15 minutes

From here, WinnowFi mostly works while you don't:

Renewal alerts arrive 7 days before each charge — monthly, quarterly, or annual.
Price increases get flagged when a service starts charging more than it used to.
A quarterly review is all the maintenance you need: open the list, run the value test from our subscription budget method, cancel what no longer earns its place.

The feature that isn't there

One thing you won't find in WinnowFi, no matter how long you look: a transaction feed. We will never show you a scrolling wall of raw bank transactions. The engine reads them so you don't have to, and what you get is the distilled answer — your subscriptions, their prices, their next billing dates.

That's a deliberate choice, not a missing feature. Less raw financial data on screen means less to process, less to worry about, and a tool that respects both your attention and your privacy. Fifteen minutes to set up, a clean list forever after. That's the deal.

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The 15-Minute WinnowFi Setup: From Sign-Up to a Clean Subscription List