Subscription spend tracker for corporate card programs

The moment it becomes a real problem: a finance manager is preparing the quarterly budget review and realizes they have no consolidated view of which SaaS vendors are being charged each month, how much, or whether those charges are coming from three different team cards. They know the money is leaving — they just can't see it as subscriptions, only as individual card transactions.

This gap persists because corporate card and expense tools are built to handle one-time expenses cleanly. Recurring charges are structurally awkward — they look like any other transaction in a ledger, and grouping them into a 'subscription' concept requires merchant pattern recognition across months of data. Incumbent vendors have no incentive to build this well because their value proposition is card issuance and approval workflows, not spend intelligence. Subscription rollups would expose how much is being spent on tools nobody sanctioned.

What existing tools get wrong here is exactly what users complain about: 'currently cannot review a list of our subscriptions and the spend on subscriptions.' Every tool shows transactions. None of them surface the merchant-level recurring pattern — 'you're paying Figma from 4 cards, totaling $840/month' — without manual spreadsheet work.

This is a business and not a feature because the problem recurs every budget cycle, every new hire who sets up their own tool subscriptions, and every audit. The cost of not having it is real: duplicate subscriptions, unauthorized recurring charges that slip through because no single transaction looks alarming, and hours of manual reconciliation before any board or investor review.

What to build

Build a web app that connects to corporate card feeds via bank APIs or CSV import, clusters recurring merchant charges into named subscriptions using transaction pattern matching, and gives finance teams a live dashboard showing monthly subscription spend by vendor, card, and department — with alerts when a new recurring charge appears from an unrecognized merchant.

Where to start

Start with companies running Airwallex or similar virtual card programs, where individual employees spin up cards for SaaS tools — that's the exact workflow where subscription sprawl compounds fastest and where a single finance manager is most likely to pay immediately to solve it.

The hard part

Merchant name normalization is genuinely hard — the same vendor appears as 'ADOBE SYSTEMS', 'ADOBE INC', 'ADOBE *CREATIVE' across different cards and banks, and getting this wrong destroys trust in the data fast enough to kill the product before word-of-mouth can build.

How it makes money

Monthly SaaS fee tiered by number of cards monitored — starts around $99/month for up to 25 cards, scales to $499/month for 200+ cards. No per-seat pricing; the buyer is one finance team regardless of company size.