Rocket Money review: The all-in-one budgeting and subscription tracking app

If you're like me, you probably have like half a dozen subscriptions you pay for on a monthly basis. The question is, do you actually need them all?

Cancelling subscriptions you don't need anymore can help you save money and redirect that cash toward other goals. And, sure, you can manually comb through your bank and credit card statements to figure out what subscriptions and memberships you're paying for, or you can use a subscription tracking app like Rocket Money to do the heavy lifting for you.

Below, we break down what you need to know about Rocket Money, including its fees, features, ratings and more.

Rocket Money links directly to your bank accounts, credit cards and investment accounts to sync data and allow you to see all your financial accounts in one place. It offers several tools to not just help you cancel unwanted subscriptions, but to also track your transactions and be more aware of where your money is going.

Subscription tracking and cancellation

The platform analyzes your transactions and identifies recurring subscriptions and bills. This is available with the free version of Rocket Money, but if you want the platform to actually cancel the subscription for you, you'll need to upgrade to the premium plan.

Personally, I've upgraded to the premium plan in the past for this exact reason and it was worth it to have Rocket Money handle some cancellations for me. However, it wasn't able to cancel everything I didn't want anymore; there are some subscriptions that require you to cancel yourself so, in this case, Rocket Money will provide brief instructions for how to go about canceling that subscription yourself.

Track your spending

Because you'll have to connect your financial accounts, it becomes easier and more convenient for you to get a good look at all of your account balances from one place. When you have to log in to multiple accounts separately to look at your balance, all these extra steps may make it feel like too much of a hassle. But logging in once and getting to see the full picture is a lot less mentally taxing for many people.

Bill negotiation

Rocket Money offers a "concierge" service that negotiates bills on your behalf and helps you get lower rates on things like your cell phone or cable bills and car insurance. It can even help you get a refund for overdrafts on your bank account.

Budgeting

You can create a budget directly in the app and monitor different spending categories. The platform also helps you calculate how much money you have to spend and will send you alerts if you're about to hit your spending limit in any categories.

Rocket Money offers a learning center on its website that's packed with blog articles educating customers on all things money — including budgeting, saving, taxes, spending and more.

Rocket Money protects your data with 256-bit AES encryption, which is the industry standard for protecting sensitive financial information, as well as TLS protocols.

Rocket Money offers a free tier and a premium tier. The free plan lets you use features like subscription tracking, budgeting, bill negotiation and bill reminders. With bill negotiation, though, it's free for you to use the feature and have them to attempt to lower the bill, but if they are successful, you'll pay a fee of 35% to 60% of the total first year savings. If they are unable to lower your bills, you won't pay anything.

For the premium tier, Rocket Money offers a unique pricing model. The platform lets users pay what they think is fair and fits their budget. Yes, you read that right, but there are a few caveats: The "pay what you think is fair" applies to a range between $7 and $14 per month. So, at a minimum, you can pay $7 per month. This sliding scale is subject to change. Premium members also get a 7-day free trial so they can peruse the platform.

Rocket Money is available for iOS and Android, and it's also available as a web version.

The app, at the time of writing, has an average 4.5- out of 5-star rating, out of 330,000 ratings on the App Store. On Google Play, it's rated an average 4.5 out of 5 stars with 127,000 reviews.

Rocket Money is an all-in-one budgeting platform and bill negotiation/subscription tracking platform. But if you don't care for the subscription tracking and bill negotiation features, there are other platforms you can consider.

Monarch offers robust expense tracking, budgeting and savings features, including the ability to create and track multiple savings goals and track your overall net worth in the dashboard. It costs $99.99 per year.

You Need A Budget (YNAB) is another highly-lauded platform for tracking and categorizing your spending. It operates on the zero-based budgeting method where you must assign every single dollar a job in your budget so everything gets used intentionally. YNAB costs $109 per year.

At CNBC Select, our mission is to provide our readers with high-quality service journalism and comprehensive consumer advice so they can make informed decisions with their money. Every budgeting app review is based on rigorous reporting by our team of expert writers and editors with extensive knowledge of budgeting products. While CNBC Select earns a commission from affiliate partners on many offers and links, we create all our content without input from our commercial team or any outside third parties, and we pride ourselves on our journalistic standards and ethics.

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