Can a billing scan tell me which subscriptions are unused?

No. A mailbox proves that a charge is scheduled; it cannot prove that anyone opened the product. The unused half of the question has to come from a system that sees logins — a password vault, single sign-on history, or one direct check per service. The scan is half the answer, and the cheapest half to get first.

Which signals point to a subscription nobody uses?

Four that are cheap to check: no login entry touched in the vault for a quarter, no product emails in months other than receipts, a seat count that stayed fixed while the team changed shape, and a plan renewed from a card belonging to someone who has left.

Why do unused subscriptions survive for so long?

Because nothing in the process notices. The invoice arrives at an address nobody reads, the card authorisation renews without a decision being made, and the only person who would have raised it is the one who stopped logging in.

What do you do with the list once you have it?

Two columns decide it: whether the item has been used in the last renewal cycle, and whether the renewal lands inside 14 days. Items used in neither cycle get cancelled. Items renewing inside 14 days get handled first, because after the charge the same action becomes a refund request instead of a cancellation.

SaaSClerk Blog · SaaS subscription visibility

How Do I Find Unused SaaS Subscriptions That Are Still Being Charged?

Short answer: "unused" and "still billed" are facts held by two different systems, so the list you want is a diff, not a search. Billing evidence lives in receipts and card statements. Usage evidence lives in vault logins, SSO history, and whether anyone still gets product emails. Build both lists, then work the rows that appear only on the money side — those are the subscriptions paying for nobody.

Why the question has no single answer

Search tools that claim to find unused subscriptions usually read one of the two sides and infer the other. Inference is where the false positives come from: a design tool used twice a year by one person is not waste, and a project-management seat nobody logs into is. The only defensible version of "unused" is a usage signal you can point at, on the same row as a billing signal you can point at.

Step one — get the money side first

Start with receipts rather than logins, because the billing side is the only one carrying dates. Twelve months of one mailbox is enough to produce one row per service with the amount, the interval, and the next renewal. A read-only scan does this in one pass; a keyword sweep of the same window produces the same rows in an afternoon.

Then add the rows the mailbox cannot see: charges on a personal card, app-store billing, and trials that converted without a confirmation email. Those only appear on statements, which is why a mailbox-only list quietly understates the total.

Step two — the four usage signals worth the time

Vault activity. A password manager that shows last-used dates answers the question per service. No entry touched in a quarter is a real signal, not an inference.
SSO or directory history. Where you have it, a sign-in log is harder to argue with than a vault entry.
Product emails other than receipts. Mentions, review requests, digest reports, and "your trial ends" notices all imply someone is inside the tool. A service whose only mail in nine months is an invoice is a candidate.
Seat count against headcount. If the invoice still says the same number of seats as when the plan was bought, and the team has since changed shape, at least one seat is paying for a person who is not there.

Step three — score the diff and act on it

Two columns are enough to turn a list into a decision, and both are already on the row:

Used last cycle?	Renews within 14 days?	Action
No	Yes	Cancel now — after the charge the same step becomes a refund request
No	No	Queue with the renewal date as the deadline; set a reminder, not an intention
Yes, one person	Either	Downgrade seats to the people who signed in, then re-price
Unknown	Either	Find the owner first — an unowned renewal is the one that survives every audit

What a scan does and does not tell you

SaaSClerk reads one mailbox, read-only, for 12 months of billing mail, and returns name, amount, interval, next renewal, and which address received the invoice for each service — plus a flag when the item looks personally purchased rather than centrally managed. It does not see logins, so it never claims a subscription is unused. It gives the money side of the diff and the date that makes the diff actionable, and an email 14 days before anything still active renews.

Start with the side you can get in one pass

Run the billing half first: scan one mailbox free at saasclerk.app. Then put the usage signals next to it. The rows with an amount and a renewal date and no person behind them are the answer to the question you started with.