I've been running at least one subscription tracker for the better part of two years, and I still manage to find something I'd forgotten about every time I do a proper audit. So when I decided to run Snoop, Emma, and Monzo Trends simultaneously — connecting all three to the same current account with 14 months of transaction history — I wasn't expecting to be surprised. This is my proper side-by-side snoop app review for UK users who actually want to know which app catches the most, not just which one has the nicest onboarding screen.
I didn't cancel anything during the 30 days. The point was to see what each app surfaced. Same data. Three very different results.
How I Set the Test Up
All three tools pulled from a single Monzo current account — Emma and Snoop via open banking (read-only), Monzo Trends baked in. The account had around 34 recurring transactions: the obvious ones like Netflix and Spotify, plus the kind of thing that quietly drifts off your radar after a few months.
I tracked every notification, every "we found something" prompt, and every subscription each app chose to list. I did this over a damp Saturday morning with the council tax renewal letter still on the kitchen table, which felt appropriately unglamorous for a financial audit. No cherry-picking, no excluding the awkward results.
What Snoop Caught — and What It Missed
Snoop was the most aggressive of the three for subscription detection, and within the first week it had flagged four subscriptions described as "could be cancelled" — including two I'd completely forgotten about. A wine club trial that had rolled into a paid plan (£9.99/month, eight months running — nearly £80 gone), and an old NowTV sports pass I was paying for while getting Sky through my broadband bundle anyway.
The Bills tab is where the real detail lives. Snoop also flagged that my council tax direct debit was slightly lower than the year before and asked whether that looked right. It did — I'd moved mid-year. And honestly, that kind of cross-year comparison surprised me. Most people would never notice a small council tax drop, let alone question it.
The UI is a bit cluttered, though. If you're the type who dismisses notifications quickly, you'll miss things. By week three I was treating the alerts like a semi-useful spam folder. The signal-to-noise ratio was better than I expected, but it does take patience.
What Snoop missed: a very small annual £2.49 app store charge, and a recurring payment through a third-party processor that it listed as a generic bank transfer without categorising it properly.
What Emma Found
Emma surfaces fewer subscriptions than Snoop, but the ones it does surface feel more considered. I covered this pattern in depth in my 12-month Emma and Snoop direct debit audit, and it held up here: Emma is better at translating monthly charges into annual cost, which is genuinely useful when you're deciding whether to cancel something.
It caught 28 of my 34 recurring transactions. The wine club it flagged too, but the suggested action was "contact the merchant directly." The NowTV pass it categorised as "streaming" without noting the potential duplicate situation. Technically correct. Not particularly actionable.
The feature I kept coming back to was Emma's bill calendar — an upcoming payments view showing what lands and when. Useful if you're managing salary-day timing and want to make sure nothing hits before the bills pot refills. That's a different use case from raw subscription detection, but it's genuinely good.
Zombie direct debit: a recurring payment to a merchant you no longer use, usually from a trial or lapsed subscription that's small enough to drift under your radar month to month.
What Monzo Trends Actually Does (and Doesn't)
Monzo Trends is the weakest of the three for subscription auditing — but that's because it's not really trying to be a subscription scanner. It's a spending categorisation tool built into a current account, and judging it on this task isn't entirely fair.
That said: if Monzo is your primary bank, Trends is still worth a look before you hand your open banking access to a third-party app. It correctly identified 21 of my 34 recurring transactions. It completely missed the wine club (ambiguous merchant name on the transaction), and it had no concept of duplicate or overlapping subscriptions at all.
Where Monzo Trends genuinely earns its keep is month-on-month category comparison and pot integration. If you've already got your bills structure sorted — I walked through exactly how to set that up in my post on salary day automation with Monzo, Starling, and Chase — Trends gives you a decent read on whether your automation is actually doing what you think it's doing.
The One Subscription Only Snoop Found
Only Snoop identified my annual meal kit charge as a recurring subscription — Emma and Monzo Trends both filed it as a one-off food purchase and moved on.
The charge was £79, hits once a year, and I'd completely lost track of it. Emma treated it as food. Monzo Trends filed it under "Eating Out." Only Snoop flagged it as an annual recurring charge and explicitly asked whether I wanted to keep it. I didn't. That one notification saved me £79 a year, which more than covers a year of Snoop's premium tier. It's the clearest argument for running Snoop as your primary scanner, even if you prefer Emma's interface for everything else.
Do the Cancellation Features Actually Work in the UK?
Both Snoop and Emma offer some form of cancellation help. Neither is particularly useful for UK users, and I say that having actually tried both rather than just reading the feature descriptions.
Emma's "request cancellation" option — where it claims to contact the merchant on your behalf — works for a handful of US-originating services. For anything running on a UK direct debit, it redirects you to contact the company directly or cancel via their own app. Which you already knew before you opened Emma.
Snoop doesn't offer direct cancellation but does surface the merchant's contact details and sometimes a direct link to the cancellation page. Slightly more useful in practice — less faff getting to the right place, even if the last step is still manual.
The actual cancellation tool for UK direct debits is your bank. You can kill any direct debit in Monzo, Starling, or Chase in two taps. What Snoop and Emma are useful for is finding the thing you need to cancel in the first place. That distinction matters when you're setting expectations for what these apps can and can't do.
Snoop, Emma, or Monzo Trends: Which UK App Should You Use?
Snoop is the best pure subscription scanner of the three. More thorough, occasionally noisy, but it found the most — including the one charge that actually cost me money to have missed. If you're doing a one-off direct debit audit, start here.
Emma is the better daily companion, especially for the bills calendar and annual cost view. If you want to see how Emma performs over a full year of transactions, my 12-month audit has the complete breakdown — including the subscriptions it caught that Snoop didn't.
Monzo Trends is fine if Monzo is your main bank and you're not ready to connect to a third-party app. But it is not a subscription tracker. Don't rely on it as one.
The practical move: run Snoop for a month, act on what it surfaces, then use Emma's calendar view to stay on top of upcoming bills. Both are free at the basic tier. And you don't have to choose just one.
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.