I have a confession. I'd been meaning to do a proper direct debit audit for about eight months. Every time a random £9.99 left my account for something I couldn't immediately name, I'd think "I'll sort that this weekend." I did not sort it that weekend. Eventually I decided to actually test the two apps that claim to do this for you — Snoop and Emma — by running them simultaneously on the same current account for 30 days. Same bank. Same transactions. Two apps. Whose numbers could I actually trust?
One caveat upfront: both Snoop and Emma have a commercial interest in showing you scary "wasted spend" figures. Frightened users open the app more. So I cross-checked every subscription they flagged against my actual bank statements. Some of what I found surprised me.
What Snoop and Emma Actually Do (and Why I Was Sceptical)
Both apps read your transaction data via open banking and use it to surface subscriptions, flag unusual charges, and calculate how much you're supposedly wasting. Neither holds your money. They're analysis layers on top of your existing bank.
Open banking app: a regulated tool that reads (but cannot move) your bank transactions using the FCA's open banking framework — safe, but only as useful as the categorisation logic behind it.
My scepticism is structural. If Emma tells me I'm wasting £47/month and I immediately cancel four things, I'm a satisfied user who tells my friends. If it tells me £12, I'm underwhelmed. There's an incentive to round up, not down. I wanted to see whether either app's figures held up when I actually pulled my statements and counted manually.
The Setup — Same Account, Both Apps Running
Both apps connected to the same Monzo account via open banking. I let them run for the full 30 days without manually dismissing any alerts or marking anything as "keep." I wanted cold, first-pass performance — what does each app surface without me coaching it?
Snoop asked for fewer permissions upfront and connected faster. Emma's onboarding is slicker, though — it walks you through a short quiz about your financial goals before you reach the dashboard. I skipped most of it, honestly. I just wanted the subscription list.
Which App Finds Hidden Subscriptions Faster?
Snoop surfaces recurring charges within roughly 48 hours of connection. Emma took closer to 72 hours to show me a complete list, though it pulled in more historical transaction data upfront.
After 30 days, here's what each app flagged as active subscriptions or regular direct debits on my account:
- Snoop: 14 recurring charges identified
- Emma: 17 recurring charges identified
The three extras Emma found? One was a quarterly VPN payment that only hits every three months — Snoop had missed it within the 30-day window. The second was a charitable donation I knew about but hadn't mentally categorised as a subscription. The third was a gym direct debit Snoop had miscategorised as a one-off payment.
Emma wins on breadth. But two of its 17 were false positives — a work reimbursement labelled as recurring income, and a one-time plumber's invoice flagged as a subscription. When I checked the statements: neither was recurring. So realistically: 15 real charges from Emma, 14 from Snoop. Much closer than the headline numbers suggest.
The most annoying find? A streaming service I'd cancelled in January — except the direct debit never actually stopped. £6.99/month, four months running. Both apps caught it. But Snoop flagged it as a "possible zombie subscription" in the first week. Emma buried it under "Entertainment." Same information, completely different UX priority.
Do Their "Wasted Spend" Numbers Actually Agree?
No. Not even close — and this is where my scepticism was most justified.
After 30 days, Snoop told me I was wasting £62/month on subscriptions I could cancel. Emma put the figure at £89/month. That's a £27 gap on the same account. I went through every item on both lists manually — dull work, done while waiting for the kettle, not going to lie — and here's what I found:
- Emma includes subscriptions it judges as "underused" based on category heuristics, not actual usage data. It decided my Amazon Prime was potentially wasteable. It is not.
- Snoop's figure was more conservative — it only flagged things I hadn't transacted with in 60+ days as cancellation candidates.
- Neither app's total matched my manual count exactly. My real "probably cancellable" figure was £34/month — about half Emma's claim and well below Snoop's number.
£34/month is still £408 a year. Worth knowing. But the inflated figures are doing nobody any favours. If you're using these apps to motivate a big subscription cull, cross-check before you cancel. I covered the manual approach in detail in my earlier post on auditing your direct debits in 30 minutes — that method combined with one of these apps is more reliable than either alone.
The UI Question: Which One Actually Makes You Cancel?
Finding a zombie subscription is step one. Actually cancelling it is where most people stall — and where the two apps differ most sharply.
Snoop shows you the merchant, the amount, the last charge date, and then offers a "how to cancel" link for most major services. For Netflix, Disney+, Spotify — it takes you directly to the cancellation page. For smaller merchants it just says "contact the company," which is less useful but honest.
Emma's cancellation flow is better designed but requires an Emma Pro subscription (£4.99/month) to unlock the full version. The free tier shows you the subscription but withholds the cancellation shortcut. That's a bit cheeky. You're paying to cancel things that are already costing you money — there's some circular logic there.
In practice I cancelled three things during the 30 days. All three via Snoop's direct cancellation prompts. Not because Emma's list was worse, but because Snoop put the action in front of me at the right moment. Behaviour change is about friction. Snoop removes more of it on the free tier.
My Verdict After 30 Days
If you want to find hidden subscriptions in the UK, run Emma first — it casts a wider net and catches quarterly and irregular payments more reliably than Snoop. Then verify every flagged item manually before treating it as gospel. Emma's headline "wasted spend" number is inflated. Mine was overstated by nearly 60%.
For actually cancelling things, Snoop's free tier wins. The interface is less polished but the cancellation links are right there, and it's better at distinguishing between "this exists" and "this is genuinely wasteable."
If you're already using your bank's built-in tools — Monzo and Starling both have solid subscription flagging — layering one of these apps on top makes sense. I covered which banks do this best in my post on UK bank features that automatically stop subscription overspending. But I wouldn't pay for either app's premium tier based on what I tested. The free versions do the job.
The £34/month I found and actually cancelled? Sorted. The eight months of procrastination beforehand? A bit rubbish, honestly.
Free tool: Use our Subscription & Direct Debit Audit spreadsheet (free) to find out exactly where your money goes each month. See all our UK finance tools.