I connected both apps to the same Monzo account on a grey Tuesday morning — I was waiting for my laptop to finish a software update, which seemed like the perfect excuse to finally do this properly. Same bank feed. Same twelve months of Open Banking data. Both apps processing in parallel. The question: in a genuine direct debit audit UK-style test, does Emma or Snoop find more money you didn't know you were spending?
I'd done a shorter version of this already — a 30-day side-by-side test to tackle direct debit leakage — but 30 days misses annual subscriptions, slow price creep, and the really ancient zombie stuff that's been quietly taking money for years. Twelve months is where it gets interesting.
Here's what each app found, in actual pounds.
How I Set Up the Direct Debit Audit
Both apps use Open Banking — read-only access, no passwords shared — and I connected them to the same main current account on the same day, with 12 months of transaction history available. I left both apps to categorise everything automatically. No manual overrides, no helping them along. I wanted to see what they figured out on their own.
Zombie direct debit: a recurring payment that still leaves your account each month for a service or subscription you no longer use — typically from a cancelled membership that didn't fully terminate at the bank's end.
Going in, I knew I had suspects. An old gym. A VPN I hadn't opened since 2023. And a vague feeling I was doubling up on some Apple subscription somewhere. The audit was partly confirmation, partly to find what I'd completely missed.
What Emma Flagged in 12 Months
Emma categorised 19 active direct debits and flagged four as worth reviewing within 48 hours of connection — the faster initial read of the two apps.
Three of those flags genuinely surprised me:
- Old gym direct debit: £9.99 a month, still running 8 months after my last visit. That's £79.92 gone. Emma listed it under Health & Fitness with the most recent payment date clearly shown — easy to spot once you're actually looking at it.
- Netflix price creep: Emma showed me the exact month Netflix ticked up from £10.99 to £17.99. A £7 monthly increase I'd completely normalised. Over a year, that's £84 extra I'd mentally budgeted wrong.
- An ancient cloud storage upsell: £4.49 a month, from a merchant name I couldn't immediately place. Took me two minutes to work out it was a storage upsell I'd clicked past in 2022. I'd been paying it for nearly three years. Honestly, I was more annoyed at myself than at the app.
Total Emma flagged as actionable: around £287 across 12 months. And the UI earns its keep here — tapping any recurring charge takes you straight to the merchant details and a clear pathway to cancel. That flow actually works.
What it missed: my VPN direct debit. £6.99 a month for a service I hadn't opened in 14 months. Emma had filed it under Tech & Software with no flag. It looked like a normal active subscription to the algorithm. No nudge, no "you haven't used this" prompt. Just silently accepted.
What Snoop Caught That Emma Didn't
Snoop caught two things Emma completely missed: a duplicate Apple Music subscription costing £83.88 a year and the inactive VPN direct debit that Emma had buried without flagging.
The Apple Music situation was embarrassing in retrospect. I was paying £6.99 a month for a standalone Apple Music plan and £19.95 a month for Apple One — which includes Apple Music. Full overlap. Snoop's duplication detection surfaced it under a "possible duplicate" flag that Emma simply doesn't have an equivalent for. That's £83.88 a year going absolutely nowhere.
Snoop also has a bill benchmarking feature that compares what you're paying against what other users in its network pay for the same service. It flagged my broadband as above average for the area. (BT. Of course it's BT.) Emma doesn't do this at all, and it's genuinely useful for spotting creep that's technically one subscription but priced higher than it needs to be.
Total Snoop flagged as worth reviewing: £312. More than Emma, with some catches Emma genuinely missed.
The Numbers: Where They Agreed and Didn't
There was a £25 gap in what each app surfaced — £287 from Emma, £312 from Snoop — and most of that gap came from two specific things: Snoop's duplication logic and its handling of the VPN charge.
Both apps agreed on the gym DD and the Netflix price creep. Where they diverged wasn't really about what they found. It was about how they framed it. Emma says: "you're paying X for this, do you want to cancel?" Snoop says: "here is an interesting fact about your money" — and then leaves you to it.
Price creep: when a recurring subscription gradually increases its price over time, often in small increments that are easy to miss month-to-month but add up significantly across 12 months.
That framing difference matters more than the £25 gap. Knowing you're wasting money is not the same as stopping it.
Which Subscription Tracking App Is Actually Useful?
Emma wins on actionability. Snoop wins on discovery. For a proper direct debit audit, you want both — but if you're only keeping one, keep Emma.
Emma is the better cancellation tool. The path from "flagged subscription" to "here's how to cancel it" is short and clear. Snoop gives you loads of interesting information and then expects you to act on it yourself, which is optimistic — inertia is the whole reason zombie subscriptions exist in the first place.
But Snoop's duplication detection and benchmarking genuinely caught things Emma didn't. My honest approach: run both for the initial audit, then drop Snoop and keep Emma for ongoing monitoring. Yes, two apps is a bit of faff. But the £83 Apple Music overlap would have stayed invisible indefinitely in Emma alone.
One thing both apps do better than nothing: they make the invisible visible. Most people have no real idea what their full direct debit list looks like until they see it laid out somewhere. The subscription economy is designed to make you forget. These apps make you remember.
Practical Steps to Run Your Own Direct Debit Audit UK
Six months of data is enough to get started — 12 months is better for catching annual subscriptions and slower price creep cycles that only show up over time.
- Connect both Emma and Snoop to your main current account via Open Banking. Five minutes each, read-only access.
- Wait 48 hours before reviewing anything — let both apps process and categorise automatically first.
- In Emma, go to Subscriptions and look at the amount column. Anything with irregular amounts month-to-month is price-creeping.
- In Snoop, check the Bills section specifically for benchmark flags and "possible duplicate" alerts — this is where it earns its place.
- Note anything Snoop surfaced that Emma didn't. Those are your highest-value leads.
- Use Emma's cancel flow for each one, on the same day. Don't make a list and come back to it. You won't.
Once you've freed up the money, the natural next move is routing it somewhere useful before it disappears into the weekly Tesco shop. I wrote about the payday standing order stack I use to move savings automatically — so the reclaimed cash goes somewhere specific rather than just evaporating.
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.
The total I reclaimed from this 12-month audit: £312 annualised. And that's before I've sorted the broadband. For connecting two apps and spending one afternoon actually looking at what leaves my account each month — not bad at all.