Payscrub: Designing for the Moment You Realize You've Been Overpaying

Type: Self-Directed Design Project · Year: 2021 · Platform: iOS Mobile Subscription spending had become invisible. I designed a mobile app to surface it — and help users act on what they found. This project shaped how I think about data-heavy fintech products.

The problem: subscriptions are designed to be forgotten

Subscription businesses optimize for frictionless sign-up and frictionless continuation. Cancellation is intentionally buried. The result: users are paying for things they've stopped using, often for months or years, without realizing it.

The design challenge wasn't just surfacing data. It was designing for the emotional moment of discovery — when someone realizes they've been paying $14/month for a service they used three times. That moment can feel alarming or empowering. The design decides which.

The goal was informed control, not anxiety. Those are very different design briefs.

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What research told me about subscription behavior

I conducted 5 generative interviews with young professionals managing 8–15 active subscriptions. Key findings:

• Users underestimated monthly subscription spend by an average of $40–60
• Existing tools (Truebill, Bobby) focused on detection and cancellation — not ongoing optimization
• The emotional peak was the "realization moment" — discovering you've been paying for something unused. Designing this well was the product's key differentiator
• Bank-linked import was the only acceptable onboarding path — manual entry caused abandonment

Insight: the realization moment is the product's superpower. Amplify it without making users feel foolish for having missed it.

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Key IA decisions

The core design problem was organizing a flat list of subscriptions into a navigable, actionable experience. Four structural decisions shaped the IA:

1. Dashboard-first, not list-first

The entry point is a spending health summary — not a list of subscriptions. Users arrive with context (how am I doing overall?) before they see the detail (here's what's contributing to that).

2. Status taxonomy: Active, Unused, Flagged

Three states, color-coded, applied to every subscription. This classification drove the entire browse experience — users could filter to "Unused" and immediately see their action list without any manual sorting.

3. Action architecture: surfaced, not searched for

Every subscription view had three primary actions: Keep, Cancel, or Pause. "Cancel" linked directly to the service's cancellation page — not a generic search. Closing the gap between intention and action was the most important UX decision in the product.

4. Notifications: quiet by default, loud when it matters

No routine alerts. Notifications fired only for: renewal reminders (3 days before charge), price changes, and newly detected subscriptions. Three use cases, no more.

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What this project carried forward

Payscrub was where I developed a principle I still apply to every fintech project: the design problem is almost never "show more data." It's "show the right data at the right moment with a clear path to action."

That principle shaped Smart Target at Inspira Financial — where the decision wasn't to show clients more investment options, but to show them one clear recommendation at the right moment, with the right supporting context.

Revisiting this today: the subscription categorization and anomaly detection I built with manual rules would now be handled by AI — Claude-assisted pattern recognition surfacing "this looks unusual" moments that rule-based systems consistently miss. That's the version I'd build now.