I was lying in bed, properly sick — cold sweats, the kind of night where you can't sleep and your phone is the only light in the room. I'd just been charged by a page I'd completely forgotten about: a free trial I signed up to, meant to cancel, and never did. The money was gone before I even understood what it was for.
I was furious. Not just at the charge — at how normal it all felt. How a company could make signing up take ten seconds and cancelling take ten minutes of digging through menus designed to make you give up. How easy it is to lose track of what you're paying for when it's scattered across a dozen apps, inboxes and bank statements.
And then, somewhere in the middle of feeling awful, a lightbulb went off. What if something just… watched your back?
That was the whole idea at the start. Something that quietly finds what you're paying for, tells you before you're charged, and — when you want out — actually walks you through cancelling instead of leaving you to fight the maze alone. No tricks. No strings attached. The thing I wished existed that night.
From there it snowballed. I had no coding experience — none. I'd never built an app, never shipped anything. So I figured it out, piece by piece, mostly on my own: the detection, the renewal tracking, the guided cancellation, the AI that scores whether a subscription is even worth keeping. Nearly every part of Quidkeep is something I taught myself how to build because I refused to let the idea die.
I'm 20. I bootstrapped this from start to finish. No funding, no team, no playbook — just a passion project and a stubborn "why not."
I won't pretend I did it completely alone — there were a few friends I made along the way who helped at the right moments, and I'm genuinely grateful for them. But the heart of Quidkeep, the late nights and the thousand small problems solved, that part was mine. And honestly, that's the part I'm proudest of.
Quidkeep is still growing, and so am I. But the reason behind it hasn't changed since that 3am moment: nobody should get blindsided by money leaving their account for something they forgot they had. If Quidkeep saves you from one of those, it's done its job.
Thanks for being here.
— Jonathan, founder of Quidkeep