The tool: get_recurring_charges
BankBridge exposes 12 MCP tools to your agent. The relevant one here is get_recurring_charges. It scans your transaction history across every connected bank, pattern-matches merchants that bill on a regular cadence, and returns a list of subscriptions with: merchant name, typical amount, frequency (monthly/annual/quarterly), last-seen date, and historical amounts.
Your agent calls the tool automatically when you ask subscription-shaped questions. You don't invoke the tool by name; you just ask in plain English.
Step-by-step
- Sign up at bankbridge.money and connect every account where subscriptions hit: business checking, business credit card, personal checking, personal credit cards.
- Paste your API key into your agent. Connect guide for Claude; each other host has a setup at /docs/<host>.
- Open a new conversation and ask one of the prompts below.
- Decide what to keep and what to cancel. The agent can draft cancellation emails, but the click is yours.
Total time: about ten minutes for the first pass. Then a quarterly five-minute review to catch creep.
Useful prompts
Start broad, then drill in:
- The first ask. "What subscriptions am I paying for? Sort by monthly cost, descending."
- Annual creep check. "Show me my biggest recurring charges sorted by yearly cost, not monthly. I want to see the annual ones at the top."
- The forgotten-service test. "Any subscription I haven't used in 90 days that's still billing me?"
- Price increases. "Which subscription has gone up in price in the last twelve months? Show me the old amount, new amount, and percentage change."
- Duplicates. "Am I paying for the same service twice under different merchant names? Streaming services and cloud storage especially."
- Annuals about to renew. "Any annual subscription that's going to renew in the next 30 days? I want to decide before it hits the card."
What it catches that you'd miss
The non-obvious ones are where this earns its $5/mo:
- Descriptor changes. "Google Workspace" can appear as "Gsuite Deallocated" one month and "Workspace Deal" the next. The agent sees those as one subscription; you might not.
- Different cadences. A weekly DoorDash order or biweekly Instacart pattern is a "recurring" charge too, even if it's not a subscription. The tool surfaces those so you see the actual size of the habit.
- Silent rate increases. Streaming services love a $1-2/mo bump every spring. You don't notice. The agent diffs the amounts.
- Auto-recharge credits. API providers and ad platforms top up your balance silently. Easy to miss in a busy month.
- Zombie trials. The 30-day trial you forgot you started six months ago. The merchant flips to charging you and you never look at the line item.
Versus Rocket Money's auto-negotiate
Rocket Money offers two things: a subscription list (like ours), and a paid "we'll call your cable company and negotiate down your bill" service that takes 30-60% of the savings.
BankBridge doesn't do the negotiation. We surface the subscriptions; you call. If you'd rather pay someone to do the call, Rocket Money is a fair pick. If you'd rather know what you're paying for and decide yourself, the longer comparison is here.
Versus just scrolling your statements
You can absolutely do this manually. Pull three months of statements, look for the same merchant repeating, write down the totals. People do it once a year and call it a subscription audit. It works.
The reason most people don't do it more often is that it takes an hour, and the savings from any single audit are usually $20-50/mo. After the third audit it's just a chore.
Asking an agent "anything new charging me this month?" takes ten seconds. The five bucks a month per bank pays for itself the first time you catch one zombie trial.