Renewal Radar
Free tool · by Daniel HaketYour real deadline is the renewal date minus the notice period — this tool computes it per subscription and generates a calendar file that reminds you before every cancel window closes. Nothing leaves your browser.
Name, renewal date and the notice period from your contract. Amounts are optional and never leave your browser.
The .ics file works with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook. Everything is generated locally — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored.
What this free tool is great for: a quick, one-off job with no signup — it runs entirely in your browser, so nothing leaves your device and there's nothing to manage.
Its honest limit: it's a one-off calculation in your browser — it doesn't save your scenarios, update as your real numbers change, or connect to your live accounts, so you re-enter the figures every time and can't watch how they move.
The business model of forgetting
Auto-renewal is not a convenience feature; it is a revenue strategy. The subscription economy runs on a simple asymmetry: the vendor needs you to do nothing, and nothing is exactly what busy people do. Renewal dates live twelve months away, notice periods hide in order forms, and the credit card quietly keeps honoring an agreement everyone else forgot. Our own pricing research across 161 tools found 17 with annual commitments and a handful with renewal price jumps — and the defense against all of them is embarrassingly low-tech: know your dates, and be reminded before they pass. That is the whole job of this tool.
Notice periods: the fine print that moves your real deadline
The date that matters is almost never the renewal date itself. B2B contracts routinely require notice 30, 60 or even 90 days before renewal — miss that window and you are committed for another year, however clearly you cancel afterwards. So your real deadline is renewal date minus notice period, and that subtraction is where people get burned: a contract renewing January 1st with 60 days' notice must be cancelled by November 2nd, in the middle of a quarter that has nothing to do with January. Find the notice period in your order form or the terms of service (search for “renewal”, “notice” or “termination”), enter it here, and the radar computes the day that actually counts.
Why a calendar file beats another subscription app
There is a small industry of subscription-tracker apps — most of which are themselves subscriptions, which is the kind of irony we try to avoid recommending. This tool takes the boring, durable route: the .ics calendar file, a standard that has worked since the nineties and imports into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and virtually everything else in two clicks. Your reminders live where you already look every day, they survive this website disappearing, they sync to your phone through infrastructure you already trust, and they cost nothing forever. No account, no app, no new thing to forget.
What the radar actually generates
For every subscription you enter, two all-day events go into the file. The first lands on your chosen lead time before the cancel window closes: “Decide: cancel or keep X?” — that is your decision moment, with the key dates and the amount in the description. The second lands on the last safe day itself: “LAST DAY to cancel X” — the backstop in case the first one got snoozed. Subscriptions whose window has already passed are marked PASSED in the table and left out of the file; there is no point alarming you about a train that has left. Everything is computed in UTC from the dates you enter, so no timezone arithmetic can shift your deadline across midnight.
What to do when the reminder fires
The event is not an instruction to cancel; it is an appointment to decide. The honest test, the same one from our Subscription Graveyard guide: if the tool is used weekly and earns its keep, renew with a clear conscience — and maybe use the moment to renegotiate, because the weeks before your notice deadline are the only time of year you have real leverage. If usage has gone quiet, apply the cancel-first test: cancel now, re-subscribe if anyone genuinely misses it within a month. Almost every vendor will happily take you back, usually with your data intact — and in practice, nobody comes asking.
The written-notice trap
One honest warning from the fine print: some B2B vendors do not accept a button-click as cancellation. Contracts — especially enterprise ones — may require written notice by email or even letter, sometimes to a specific address, sometimes “no less than X days prior”. When your decision event fires, do not just toggle a setting and assume it worked: send the email, name the contract and the renewal date, and ask for written confirmation of the cancellation. Two minutes of formality closes the loophole that keeps unwilling customers paying for another year.
What this tool honestly cannot do
The radar computes with what you give it — it cannot read your contract. If you enter a 30-day notice period and the contract says 60, the calendar will be confidently wrong, so check the order form once before trusting the math. It also does not know about mid-term price changes, seat additions that reset terms, or the vendor updating their conditions — the reminder is your prompt to look, not a substitute for looking. And it deliberately stores nothing: close this tab and your list is gone, which is the privacy trade-off working as intended. Keep the .ics; that is your durable copy — and regenerate it whenever a contract changes, which takes less time than reading this sentence did.
Privacy by construction
Everything here runs in your browser: the dates, the amounts, the generated file. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored — the .ics is assembled locally as plain text and handed to you as a download. That matters for exactly the data this tool touches: what your business pays, to whom, and when your contracts are vulnerable. That list is confidential by nature, and the only copy of it should be yours. If you want the full picture of what your stack costs before setting the reminders, run the Stack X-Ray first — same privacy model — and check which of your tools carry an annual-commitment flag in the Atlas.
Renewal discipline is half — where Melio does more
Knowing your dates keeps you out of contracts you did not choose; the other half of payment discipline is making the money move on time for the ones you keep. That is where Melio does more: schedule bill payments against their due dates, route approvals so nothing waits on a signature, and sync with your bookkeeping so nothing is entered twice. The radar guards the exits; Melio runs the road in between — together they turn “I think we pay that annually?” into a calendar you control.
Frequently asked questions
What is a notice period and where do I find mine?
The minimum time before renewal by which you must cancel — often 30-60 days in B2B contracts. Check your order form or the vendor's terms (search for 'renewal' or 'termination'). If you enter the wrong notice period, the reminder will be wrong too, so verify it once.
Does this work with Google Calendar / Outlook / Apple Calendar?
Yes — the tool generates a standard .ics file, supported by all major calendar apps. Import it once and the reminders live in the calendar you already check daily. No account or app needed.
Is my subscription data stored anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser: dates, amounts and the generated file never leave your device. Close the tab and the list is gone — the downloaded .ics is your only copy, by design.
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