Truebill raises seed funding to help you cancel unwanted subscriptions

Truebill, a startup that helps people track and cancel their subscriptions, announced it has raised a small round of seed funding.

The round includes $120,000 from Y Combinator, with additional funding from angel investors like David Marcus (formerly a PayPal executive and now vice president of messaging products at Facebook), KISSmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah and Saba founder Bobby Yazdani, bringing the total round size to $350,000.

Now, some of you might be responsible people who don’t need any help managing your subscriptions. But are you sure there aren’t any surprises lurking in your bank and credit card statements? It’s easy to forget to cancel something, and Truebill founder and CEO Yahya Mokhtarzada argued that as more and more businesses are moving toward a subscription model, the need for something like Truebill will only grow.

“People don’t want to remember 15 different logins for 15 different services,” Mokhtarzada said.

What the service currently does is examine your bank statement, identify subscriptions and help you cancel with one-click when something isn’t wanted. And to be clear, you don’t need to remember your login information to cancel — Truebill will just ask for the needed information, like your email address and your billing address. (In more difficult cases, like gyms, you might need to cancel in person or send a certified letter, but Truebill can actually generate that letter automatically.)

Mokhtarzada added that since Truebill launched out of beta testing in February, more than 10,000 people have signed up and they’ve canceled more than $300,000 worth of annual subscriptions.

Eventually, he said he wants Truebill to become a “full subscription management platform.” In other words, not only will it help you cancel subscriptions, but it could notify you when a subscription needs your attention, say if you need to provide more information for a NatureBox or Blue Apron delivery.

“We actually take a positive view of subscriptions,” Mokhtarzada said. “Subscriptions are good for consumers — they’re convenient, they help consumers try things when they’re not ready to buy it yet. We want to make it easier to make subscriptions a bigger part of your life by reducing the friction in both signup and cancellation.”