during the christmas holidays of 2024, spotify charged James.

nothing unusual about that. he'd subscribed to spotify, after all.

except he wasn't really using it anymore. youtube music had become his preferred alternative, and seeing the renewal reminded him of something he'd been putting off for a while: figuring out exactly how much money he was spending on subscriptions every year.

so he finally sat down to do it.

the plan was simple: open a google sheet, list every subscription, calculate how much they cost annually, and move on with his life.

except his subscriptions weren't all in one currency.

some were in naira. some in euros. others in us dollars.

suddenly, the very simple spreadsheet needed to do a little more.

James wanted to enter each subscription in its actual currency, see what he was spending across all three currencies, and have the conversions update without manually checking exchange rates every time they changed.

with some help from chatgpt and google finance, what was supposed to be a quick exercise in documenting his subscriptions turned into a small finance experiment.

eventually, he got it working.

then, naturally, he wrote about the whole thing on his blog.

he thought that was the end of it.

it wasn't.

then Aremu made a copy

Aremu Oluwagbamila, one of James' friends, and eventual xtrackr co-founder, read the article and asked James to share the spreadsheet with him.

Aremu thought he was spending somewhere around ₦100,000 a year on subscriptions.

after putting everything into the sheet, he discovered it was actually more than ₦500,000.

which is the sort of discovery you apparently have to share with other people.

so he posted it on his whatsapp status.

Samad, a former colleague of Aremu's, saw the post and asked where he'd gotten the numbers from.

“a google sheet.”

Samad had another question:

“so where's the app?”

there wasn't one.

it was literally just a spreadsheet James had made because spotify charged him during the christmas holidays.

but now someone else had used it.

they'd learned something useful from it.

they'd shared what they learned.

and someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the original experiment had looked at the whole thing and assumed there should be an app behind it.

so Aremu took the question back to James:

“do you want to build an app for this Google Sheet thing you built?”

James' answer was simple enough:

“no problem. let's build this thing.”

and that's how xtrackr started.

building the app was the slightly harder part

James tackled the name, branding, and initial designs within a week.

getting an actual app into people's hands took several months.

in august 2025, the first version of xtrackr went live.

since then, we've kept working on it.

the app has gone through major iterations and updates as we've used it ourselves, watched other people use it, and figured out what was worth changing.

and, more importantly, people actually started using the thing.

as of writing this, xtrackr has been downloaded more than 265 times across android and ios, with around 20 paying users.

those aren't enormous numbers.

but considering this whole thing started with a google sheet built to answer one person's question, we're quite fond of them.

turns out, subscriptions are a little complicated

the original idea behind xtrackr was straightforward: give people somewhere to keep track of their subscriptions, how much they cost, and when they're due.

then people started adding things we hadn't necessarily considered subscriptions.

rent.

bus cards.

monthly groceries.

and other expenses that simply happen again and again.

that was interesting.

because we'd started by thinking about subscriptions.

our users were thinking about recurring spending.

there's a difference.

and it's changing the way we think about xtrackr.

so, what is xtrackr becoming?

we're still figuring that out.

xtrackr is a subscription tracker today, but the way people use it is already pushing us to think beyond subscriptions.

we're exploring expense tracking and other ways of helping people keep track of where their money goes, while holding on to the thing that made the original spreadsheet useful in the first place: being able to see what you're spending and what it's costing you over time.

the spreadsheet started because one person wanted to answer a question:

how much am i actually spending on this stuff?

we think that's still a pretty good question.

we're just building a much better way to answer it.

and yes, Samad eventually got his app.