The money nobody in the house decided to spend is the hardest money to find. It does not arrive as a bill. It leaves as a small deduction on a Tuesday, from a line somebody topped up on Monday, for something that was useful in March and has not been opened since.
Rwanda is a prepaid country — at the end of March 2026 the regulator counted 14,001,080 active SIM cards and only 174,764 postpaid ones, which is 1.2 percent — and prepaid is supposed to make this impossible. It does not. A prepaid balance can be drawn down by a renewal just as a bank account can, and because there is no monthly statement arriving in the post, nobody notices until the credit runs out earlier than it used to.
This is a practical audit: how to list every recurring charge on a household's lines, decide which ones survive, and get the rest stopped. It also carries a suggestion for what to do with the money you free up, since an app like I am Beezy pays for viewing content and can cover a line you decide to keep rather than cancel.
Where a Rwandan household actually leaks money
Before hunting, know what you are hunting. Three leaks account for most of it, and one of them is measured by the regulator with a precision that is rare anywhere.
The pay-TV figure that says everything
At 31 March 2026 the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority counted 573,215 registered pay-television subscribers, of whom 151,301 were active — 26.4 percent. Nearly three-quarters of registered pay-TV subscriptions in Rwanda are not active at any given moment. Among the active ones, Canal+ Rwanda holds 80 percent, Star Africa Media 11 percent, Tele 10 8 percent and Azam Media 1 percent. Decoder sales in the quarter fell 19.5 percent year on year. This is a market where people sign up, drift away, and often keep paying for a while out of pure inattention.
The bundle that lapses into out-of-bundle pricing
The second leak is not the subscription, it is what happens when it ends. RURA publishes both prices. Out of bundle, data costs 10 Frw per megabyte on MTN and 5 Frw per megabyte on Airtel; inside a bundle, the effective unit price falls to 0.8463 Frw per megabyte on MTN and 0.2310 Frw on Airtel, against a market average of 0.7556. Voice follows the same pattern: 45 Frw a minute out of bundle on MTN and 35 on Airtel. A renewal that fails silently is therefore not neutral — the same usage simply becomes far more expensive, and the balance disappears without anything visibly changing.
The small ones you never agreed to twice
Then there are the content and value-added services: a ringtone pack, a news alert, a game credit, a service someone subscribed to from an advertisement and never used again. Individually they are trivial. Together, on four lines in one household, they are the difference between a top-up lasting a week and lasting five days.
How to find every renewal in one evening
Memory is useless for this. Every household that tries to do it from memory finds two of the six charges it is paying. Work from records instead.
Start from the transaction history, not from recollection
Mobile money is where most of this passes: SIM cards attached to an active mobile money account reached 8,558,024 at the end of March 2026, 59.4 for every 100 inhabitants, split 85.7 percent MTN and 14.3 percent Airtel. Pull the last three months of transaction history for every line in the house and read it line by line. Anything that appears in all three months at a similar amount is a renewal, whatever it is called.
Then check each line's own self-service menu
The transaction history shows what was taken; the operator's self-service menu or app shows what is still armed to be taken again. Go through the subscriptions or services section on each line separately, including the lines belonging to children and to relatives whose phone you top up. A charge on somebody else's handset paid from your balance is still your money.
Write it down in four columns
| Column | What to record | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The exact name shown on the deduction | You will need it word for word to cancel or complain |
| Which line | The number it is charged to, and whose phone that is | Cancellation is nearly always done from the line itself |
| How often | Daily, weekly, monthly | Daily renewals look tiny and cost the most over a year |
| Last used | The last date anyone in the house genuinely used it | This is the column that makes the decision for you |
Which renewals are worth keeping?
Cancelling everything is not the goal. Some of these are the cheapest way to buy what your household actually consumes, and cutting them pushes you onto out-of-bundle pricing, which is worse.
The rule that settles most lines
Keep a renewal only if somebody used it in the last thirty days and can say what for. Everything else goes. That single rule usually clears half the list without argument, because the awkward cases are the ones where nobody can name the last use.
Watch the operator gap before you switch anything
The two networks are not priced alike, and the difference is published rather than guessed: on bundles, Airtel's effective price per megabyte is roughly a quarter of MTN's. But mobile money sits overwhelmingly on MTN, at 85.7 percent of accounts, and MTN also runs the larger agent network with 146,892 active agent SIM cards against Airtel's 48,847. The household arbitrage in Rwanda is genuinely between the cheaper megabyte and the network where the money and the agents are, and it deserves a decision rather than a default.
Keep the context in proportion
Communication is one of the few things in Rwanda that has barely risen. Over the twelve months to June 2026 the communication index gained 4.1 percent, while urban inflation overall reached 13.6 percent, health rose 71.2 percent, energy 44.8 percent and transport 26.0 percent. Your phone spending is probably not what changed this year — but it is one of the few lines you can act on in an evening, which is exactly why it is worth auditing.
Turning a cancelled line into earnings with I am Beezy
An audit like this produces a small monthly saving and a slightly deflated feeling: you have stopped a leak, but nothing new is coming in. It is worth pairing the two.
How a view becomes money
Instead of a charge leaving the balance, something arrives in it. I am Beezy shows content — videos, articles, advertisements — credits every view you complete, and pays the total out to the payment method the household already uses. Expect the platform reference of 5 to 15 euros a day. That figure has no local twin: Rwanda publishes no euro parity you can look up, because the central bank keeps its exchange rate behind an accreditation, so convert at the day's rate whenever you want the amount in RWF.
Point it at one specific line
The trick that makes this stick is to attach the earnings to a named cost rather than to the general budget: the data bundle you decided to keep, or the pay-TV subscription the household genuinely watches. A saving with a destination survives; a saving that disappears into the balance does not.
How do you actually stop one, and make it stick?
Cancelling is usually easy. Proving you cancelled, three weeks later, is the part people get wrong.
Cancel on the channel that started it
A subscription taken through a self-service menu is generally stopped through the same menu; one taken through an app is stopped in the app; one taken through a shop or an agent may need the shop or the customer service line. Guessing wastes an afternoon. Ask the operator's customer service which channel governs the specific service you named in your list.
Keep the confirmation, in writing
Take a screenshot of the cancellation confirmation, with the date visible, and keep it with the reference number. If you cancel by phone, ask for a reference and write down the name of the person you spoke to and the time of the call. This costs thirty seconds and it is the only thing that turns a dispute into a refund.
Check the next two cycles
Then verify twice, not once. Look at the transaction history at the next renewal date and at the one after. A charge that reappears after a confirmed cancellation is no longer a household admin problem — it is a complaint, and Rwanda has published channels for exactly that.
Who to contact when a deduction keeps coming
Two national bodies handle this, and both publish free numbers. Use them; they exist precisely because individual complaints to an operator sometimes go nowhere.
The two channels, and what each covers
| Body | What it covers | How to reach it |
|---|---|---|
| Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority | Telecoms, pay television, energy, water, transport | Consumer complaint form on its licensing portal; toll free 3988 |
| RICA | Consumer protection and competition across businesses generally | Toll free 9899, and info@rica.gov.rw |
| Your operator's customer service | The first step, and the one you must be able to prove you took | The line published by MTN or Airtel |
| Your pay-TV provider | Decoder and subscription disputes | The provider named on the deduction |
What to have ready before you call
Have four things in front of you: the exact name of the service as it appears on the deduction, the line it is charged to, the dates and amounts of the last three charges, and your cancellation reference. A complaint with those four elements is handled; a complaint that begins with "something keeps taking my money" is not.
The habit that prevents the next one
Put a recurring reminder in the phone for the first Saturday of each month and spend ten minutes on the transaction history. Rwanda dematerialised its administration and its payments faster than almost anywhere in the region, which is convenient and which also means more of your money moves without anyone handing you a piece of paper. A monthly look is the whole defence. And if the household's phone spending should be covering part of itself, signing the family up to I am Beezy is free, and it moves the viewing time already happening here to the other side of the ledger.
