Wouldn’t it be great if monzo recognised and allowed your subscriptions and membership payments to be predicted like direct debits?
Currently Monzo predicts your direct debits Scheduled payments. But wouldn’t it be great to see things like your subscription changes under the same umbrella? E.g. Netflix £9.99, Spotify £14.99 etc.
If this feature is already available, can someone please tell me how to do set this up???
Already been discussed loads of times currently it cannot be done as there is no pre warning of the amount and who from only possibility is using IFTTT, until if ever that changes
It can be done though, Starling does it and shows the last billed amount
A customer realistically isn’t ever going to be charged anything but £4.99 or £9.99 for Spotify subscriptions unless it’s a promotion and then after that it will change to the £4.99 or £9.99
Same with Netflix, I don’t think people change tiers every month. You only need to show the last billed amount to make an incredibly useful feature
Edit: not predicted to the day but it shows as continuous payments; you can’t do predictions to the day because of the way it’s just a continuous card authorization for them to bill you whenever
Do you know how Starling manage this? I’m presuming it’s logic on their side that ‘predicts’ rather than gets any notification from the subscription? Just curious.
Ok, but I don’t use Spotify, I use iTunes and I pay for Apple TV+, iCloud storage, Apple Arcade and iTunes family subscription that alone is £32 a month via 4 different transactions and not including any films I buy off iTunes.
They all just show as iTunes payments, same with Amazon (but they change merchant data with nearly every transaction 
You also have the option to add card transactions as recurring payments and as I do not use starling, do they have pots and are you able to pay DD’s and SO for their equivalent feature?
Guesswork is all they’ve got so Monzo can match this already. That’s what the ‘Repeating Payment’ switch does on the transaction detail page. Select that, provide the repeat interval and off you go.
Just go on a subscription payment and toggle it to repeating and the select the interval 
It often does this automatically but if its not showing up under your committed spends for the next month in Summary, you just need to pop in to a previous transaction and set it up. It’s likely it will already be doing it though in your committed spending!
Edit: My guess is you havnt had a payment yet from these go out of your account which is why it’s not showing up yet in the scheduled payments section. As they’re subscriptions and not direct debits Monzo can’t see them until they come out, but then it normally auto sets them as recurring when they are subscriptions. I think the other people in this thread are getting confused with the bill pots feature which doesn’t sound like what you’re asking for
Ah I see what you mean. So technically no, you can’t treat subscriptions the same way as direct debits. This is because with direct debits the company collecting the money has to talk to Monzo in advance of the money being collected, letting them know they’re going to collect the money on this day at a set time every month. With subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify, they don’t set up a direct debit so they just go and grab £8 or whatever from your account when they want since they have your card details on file. So each transaction is like a normal one when you’ve been to a shop, and they dont tell your Monzo anything about it in advance.
Monzo does some clever stuff to work out that these are actually recurring transactions and so puts them in your scheduled payments section of the app, and in your committed spend in the summary section of the app (to exclude from your ‘left to spend’ amount), but they cant make them payable from a pot (yet!) as they havn’t got advanced warning of them coming out.
So essentially the options are to trust your ‘left to spend’ amount as what you actually have left rather than actual money in your account, or manually move money out of a subscriptions type pot after it goes out. I think there is some fancy stuff you can do to automate this money moving out afterwards with IFTTT (If this then this, an automation app) but not within the Monzo app itself at the moment.
edit: you removed your post 
but essentially this is a reply to wanting them to work like direct debits from bill pots!
I believe banks can see when card payments are marked as ‘recurring’ by the originator. Think @Rika might have said this years ago.
Edit: Apparently not.
No they can’t. This came up on the thread for cancelling these sorts of requests a week or so ago.
It’s a naff system overall.
Thanks. I wonder how Starling does it then.
Starling don’t do anything more than Monzo do in automatically putting subscriptions under the recurring payments section.
So perhaps what i actually meant was for Monzo to allow these payments to be paid from my bills pot… that surely cant be that hard?
I think Monzo mentioned looking into it but its much harder as theres no commitment to taking the funds or the amount of funds in advance so it’s much less likely to be a sure thing than with direct debits and much more prone to error.
It’s easy to transfer the money after the payments gone out. Running it as the Bills pot does (transfer before money goes out) relies on guesswork so they’re going to need a strategy for what to do when the guess is wrong, particularly where there isn’t the money in the main account to make the payment and the transfer hasn’t happened.
It’s not really guesswork if the user has marked a card payment as recurring and that the same amount should be deducted from the Bills Pot.
It would be a little more complicated for recurring card payments where the amount being paid varies, I’m not aware of any of these but even then I can’t see it being too different to how Summary predicts the left to spend with direct debits i.e. use the last payment value as a prediction for the next.
This is the real crux of the issue but I don’t think it’s beyond monzo to be able to work it out.
Perhaps a prerequisite for having a card subscription pot is that you need to have an overdraft in place? Virtual cards that can be linked to a Pot rather than the main account? Maybe it it should be a Plus feature, with IFTTT being the solution for the standard accounts?
I don’t know what the best solution would be but it would be great to try and figure it out.
I think the issue is partly in the timing, they can come out at any time during the day (often not being the same each month!) instead of direct debits that come out at a set time each cycle.
Working out the time the card transaction will occur so as to withdraw money seconds before is likely impossible even for Monzo! Yes, there may be a compromise but it won’t be pretty behind the scenes.
Any ideas on how it could work? In app solutions which let customers set money aside for their subscriptions?