Example execution pack
This is a saved public example of an Edge Arena execution pack. It shows the same structure a user receives after a run, using the prompt: “Build an app that helps people find, track, and cancel recurring subscriptions they forgot they were paying for.”
Saved example artifact • Your own pack will reflect your goal, launchpad, and constraints
Executing:
Catch Forgotten Subscriptions Before They Renew (SubSweep)
Use this pack like a working document — review, validate, then execute.
Surface forgotten charges before they hit your card — no bank login required.
Selected from 22 ideas • Winner score 81
A subscription tracker that finds forgotten recurring charges via manual add and email-receipt parsing, then reminds you 3 days before every renewal. Built as an 8-week MVP on Expo + Supabase, with Plaid bank-linking deliberately deferred to v2.
If you execute consistently, you could have a usable MVP in ~8 weeks.
boltStart here - first steps
Have a working manual-add flow with list view, reminder scheduling, and the inbound email parsing endpoint accepting a forwarded receipt on a real device inside 5 business days.
Build account creation + manual subscription add form (name, amount, billing cycle, next-renewal date) + list view sorted by next-renewal.
1–2 days
Build the inbound email parsing Supabase Edge Function: accept a forwarded receipt, extract merchant name + amount + renewal date via GPT-4o-mini, create a subscription row.
2 days including testing against 10 real receipt formats
Wire Supabase cron + APNs / FCM push to fire a reminder notification 3 days before a subscription renewal date.
1 day including device-side testing on iOS and Android
Why This Won
01. Execution Plan
Get manual add, email parsing, and the reminder notification working end-to-end on a real device.
- 1.Build account + manual subscription add + list/detail screens.
- 2.Build inbound email parsing endpoint and test on 10 real receipt formats.
- 3.Wire reminder push notifications via Supabase cron + APNs/FCM.
- 4.Run the full flow solo: add 5 subscriptions (3 manual, 2 by forwarding real receipts), confirm reminders fire on a test renewal date.
A working app flow where a forwarded Netflix renewal receipt auto-populates a subscription row and fires a push reminder 3 days before the next renewal.
Email HTML from major subscription services varies wildly. Budget an extra day for the parser to handle Gmail forwarding headers, plain-text fallback, and non-English locale amounts. Scope to English receipts in v1.
Do not add a spending-insights dashboard or charts in this phase. The only screen that matters is the list sorted by next-renewal - everything else is scope creep.
Onboard 20 real users and observe the first 14 days including whether they forward receipts and whether reminders fire correctly.
- 1.Recruit 20 users from r/personalfinance and r/mildlyinfuriating via an honest post describing the forgotten-subscription problem.
- 2.Onboard each via a 5-minute screen-share - watch them add first 3 subscriptions.
- 3.Monitor email parsing success rate for all forwarded receipts.
- 4.Send the day-7 in-app survey and read every response.
15+ Users complete the onboarding flow, email parsing succeeds on 70%+ of forwarded receipts, at least 8 users report finding a forgotten charge in the first session.
A 70% email parsing success rate is the realistic v1 target, not 95%. Users who forward receipts that fail will fall back to manual add - make the fallback graceful and clearly prompted.
Read every day-7 survey response before building anything in week 8. The responses will tell you whether the email path is worth investing in further or whether manual add is carrying most of the value.
Submit to App Store and Play, reach 500 paying subscribers through organic content and Reddit.
- 1.Submit to App Store and Play with screenshots of the list view and a real "we found 3 forgotten charges" onboarding result.
- 2.Post 2 short TikToks per week around the forgotten-subscription angle ("I was paying for this for 14 months").
- 3.Post in r/personalfinance and r/frugal with a transparent write-up of how the app works and what the operator's own forgotten charges were.
- 4.Read 12-week numbers and decide v2 priority: Plaid linking vs household sharing vs web app.
500 Paying subscribers ($2,000 MRR), 4.4+ App Store rating, and a written v2 spec grounded in day-30 retention data.
The TikTok "I was paying $12/month for 14 months" format is the highest-performing personal-finance content category in 2024-2025. A genuine story with a real forgotten charge performs 4-6x better than a product feature walkthrough.
Do not add Plaid in v2 unless trial-to-paid conversion from email-parsing users is below 40%. If it is above 55%, bank-linking is a v3 feature - users are already paying without it.
02. Validation Signals
84% Of consumers underestimate their monthly subscription spend; the average underestimate is $133/month (C+R Research 2023 Subscription Commerce Report)
Confirms the core problem at population scale - the forgotten-charge issue is not a niche edge case but the majority consumer experience.
Limitation: C+R Research is commissioned by subscription-commerce companies; the sample skews toward active online shoppers. The directional finding is widely corroborated by West Monroe and Deloitte data but the exact $133 figure should be treated as an upper bound.
The average US adult pays for 4.5 streaming services and spends $61/month on streaming alone, up from $48 in 2022 (Deloitte Digital Media Trends Survey 2024)
Establishes the subscription density that makes the forgotten-charge problem worse every year - more services means more forgotten ones.
Limitation: Streaming is the highest-visibility subscription category; software and SaaS subscriptions (often the most forgotten) are undercounted in surveys that focus on media.
Consumer surveys consistently show most people underestimate subscription spend and have forgotten at least one active subscription. The unknown is willingness to pay $3.99/month for a dedicated tracker when free alternatives exist - verify with at least 100 paid subscribers before scaling paid acquisition.
03. Core Strategy
MVP Architecture
Expo (iOS + Android) -> Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Edge Functions) -> inbound email parsing endpoint (Supabase Edge Function + LLM extraction) -> Stripe subscriptions for the $3.99/month plan -> scheduled reminder jobs (Supabase cron + push via APNs / FCM).
Tech Stack
Expo SDK 51 (React Native) + TypeScript, Supabase managed backend (Postgres + Auth + Realtime + Edge Functions + cron), Stripe Billing for the $3.99/month subscription with 14-day trial, Apple Push Notification Service + Firebase Cloud Messaging for renewal reminders, a lightweight LLM call (GPT-4o-mini) inside the Edge Function for receipt-field extraction. Deploy via Expo Application Services.
Scope Boundary
MVP supports: manual subscription add (name, amount, billing cycle, next-renewal date), email-receipt forwarding to a personal SubSweep inbox address for automatic extraction, push + email reminders 3 days before renewal, free-trial-ending alerts, a list view sorted by next-renewal date, and a $3.99/month subscription with a 14-day trial. Out of scope for v1: Plaid or any bank/card linking, net-worth tracking, budgeting categories, investment accounts, shared household plans, web app.
Build Timeline
Week 1: account setup + manual subscription add + list/detail screens. Week 2: inbound email parsing endpoint - first pass, tested against 5 real receipt formats. Week 3: email parsing hardening - expand to 15+ receipt formats, handle Gmail forwarding headers and plain-text fallbacks, scope to English receipts in v1. Week 4: push + email reminder scheduler (Supabase cron + APNs/FCM) + free-trial-ending alert logic. Week 5: Stripe Billing - $3.99/month plan + 14-day trial gating the reminder feature. Week 6: end-to-end integration testing across manual add, email parse, and reminder paths on real iOS and Android devices. Week 7: pilot with 20 users, monitor parsing success rate, collect day-7 survey responses, fix top issues. Week 8: bug fixes from pilot feedback, App Store and Play Store submission.
First User Strategy
Start with 20 users the operator personally recruits from Reddit communities (r/personalfinance, r/mildlyinfuriating). Onboard each user via a 5-minute screen-share, watch them add their first 3 subscriptions, and confirm the reminder fires on a test subscription before the session ends.
04. Risks & Operator Advice
Email parsing fails on a large share of real receipt formats, making the primary intake path unreliable and causing users to abandon after a failed forward
If the email path is unreliable, SubSweep becomes a plain manual tracker - indistinguishable from a note in Apple Reminders. A failed forward that shows no feedback is the highest-friction churn trigger in the first session.
Mitigation: On every parse failure, immediately show a pre-filled manual-add form with whatever fields the parser did extract. A graceful fallback keeps the user in the flow and reduces the perception of failure to a single extra tap rather than a dead end.
Users conflate SubSweep with a bank-linked app and abandon during onboarding when they realise no bank login is required - interpreting the absence of Plaid as a feature gap rather than a deliberate choice
The mental model most users arrive with is "Mint / Copilot for subscriptions" - which means bank login. Onboarding copy that does not address this expectation head-on will produce high drop-off at the first screen.
Mitigation: Open the onboarding with an explicit statement: "SubSweep does not connect to your bank in v1 - you add subscriptions manually or by forwarding a receipt email. Bank linking is coming in v2." Framing the absence as a deliberate privacy choice converts a perceived gap into a differentiating trust signal.
05. Immediate Next Steps
Manual add is the fallback for every intake path and the screen users return to most - getting it right before the email parser exists prevents rework when parse failures fall back to it.
Email parsing is the highest-risk build item and the core differentiator - the longer it stays untested on real HTML, the more it will block the week-4 reminder wiring.
Gating reminders (not the list) lets free-trial users discover forgotten charges before hitting the paywall - the highest-intent users convert on the reminder promise, not the list view.
The onboarding copy sets the mental model that determines whether email forwarding gets tried at all - if users don't understand the intake path in the first 30 seconds, they won't use it.
06. Supporting Evidence
Claims
Market size
84% Of consumers underestimate their monthly subscription spend by an average of $133/month (C+R Research 2023 Subscription Commerce Report).
Market size
The average US adult now pays for 4.5 streaming services and spends $61/month on streaming alone (Deloitte Digital Media Trends Survey 2024).
Pricing
Utility apps at $2.99-$4.99/month convert at 4-7% trial-to-paid on iOS when the trial surfaces concrete value in the first session (RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2024).
Evidence
Industry data
C+R Research 2023 Subscription Commerce Report - consumer subscription spend underestimation survey.
Industry data
Deloitte Digital Media Trends Survey 2024 - streaming service count and monthly spend per US adult.
Community survey
RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2024 - iOS trial-to-paid conversion benchmarks by price tier.
System Provenance
AI-generated plan, stress-tested by competing agents for feasibility. May contain assumptions, inaccuracies, or incomplete context. Outcomes may vary—use your judgment.