Here's a fun and slightly scary experiment: ask Claude to go through your inbox like a forensic accountant and find the money quietly leaving your account every month. When I did it, it surfaced subscriptions I had completely forgotten I was paying for. Free trials that turned into charges. Tools I used once and never opened again. It added up to more than I wanted to admit.

This is the full 4 prompt chain from the video. You run them in order, in the same chat, and by the end you have a clean list of exactly what to cancel and how to cancel it. No budgeting app, no spreadsheet, no willpower required. Let's set it up.

First, connect your email to Claude

The whole thing works because Claude can read your receipts and bank alerts directly. You give it access to your inbox once, and it does the digging for you.

  • Open Claude (claude.ai) and go to Settings.
  • Under Connectors, connect Gmail (or Outlook) and turn the access toggles on.
  • Start a new chat. Now Claude can actually see the emails the charges hide in.

If you'd rather not connect anything, you can still do this. Export or forward your receipts and paste them in, or run the same prompts inside ChatGPT with its email connector. The prompts are identical. Connecting the inbox just makes it effortless.

One honest note before you start: an AI audit is a flashlight, not your bank. Treat the list as a fast, brutal first pass, then confirm anything important against your actual statement before you cancel it.

The 4 prompts, in order

Run these one after another in the same chat so Claude keeps the context. Each one builds on the last.

1. The forensic accountant (find every charge)

This pulls every silent subscription into one clean list, with the amount and how often it hits. Paste it with your inbox connected.

Act as a forensic accountant. Scan every receipt, invoice, and bank alert in my inbox from the last 12 months and list every recurring charge, the amount, and how often it hits. Put it in a table sorted by yearly cost, highest first, and include the merchant name and the date of the most recent charge. Flag any that increased in price during the year.

2. The brutal filter (find the zombies)

Now you separate the things you actually use from the ones you've been paying for out of pure inertia. Stay in the same chat and send this.

Now flag the ones I haven't actually used or opened an email from in the last 90 days. Be brutal. Don't let me justify anything. For each one, show the monthly cost, the yearly cost, and the last time there was any sign I used it.

3. The sort (needs, nice-to-haves, waste)

This turns the list into a decision. It groups everything and tells you exactly what to cut to hit your number.

Group the rest into needs, nice-to-haves, and pure waste of money. Tell me exactly which ones to cancel today to hit $1,000 in monthly savings. Show the running total as I cancel down the list so I can see when I hit the goal.

4. The kill list (the cancellation links)

The last one removes every excuse. It hands you where to go for each cancellation so you can knock them out fast.

Now give me the exact cancellation link or cancellation steps for each one so I can kill them in the next 20 minutes. For each subscription, give the direct "manage subscription" or "cancel" URL if you know it, and if you're not sure, give me the precise path to cancel inside that account instead of guessing a link.

A real-world heads up: some companies bury the cancel button on purpose, and Claude will sometimes give you the login page rather than a magic one-click link. That's fine. The point is it tells you exactly where to go for each one, so you're not hunting. Work down the list while the momentum is hot.

Why this works better than a budgeting app

Budgeting apps show you categories. They tell you that you spent "$340 on software" and leave you to figure out what that even was. This goes the other direction. It names the actual charges, the ones buried in an inbox nobody wants to dig through, and shows you the single number you've been avoiding. The digging was always the hard part. Now you hand it to Claude.

The other thing that makes it land is the order. The first prompt is neutral and factual, so you can't argue with it. The second one takes away your excuses. The third forces a decision. The fourth removes the friction. By the time you finish, the only thing left is to click cancel a few times.

Make it a habit

Do this once and you'll claw back a chunk of money in an afternoon. Do it every quarter and you'll never let a zombie subscription live for more than 90 days again. Drop a reminder in your calendar for three months out that just says "run the audit." Future you will be glad the charges never got a chance to pile up.

Go run it tonight and tell me the number it finds. I bet it's higher than you think.
– Anir

If this is the kind of AI thinking you want working on your own business, apply to work with me. And to catch the next breakdown, join the newsletter.