Somewhere in your accounts there is a service you stopped using in March and are still paying for in August. Everyone knows this in the abstract. What stops most people from doing anything about it is not laziness, it is that the search feels endless: an old email address, a phone with three stores on it, a bank app, a couple of foreign platforms, a bundle from a telecom operator. Where do you even start.
In Serbia the answer is unusually narrow, and it comes from how the country's payment plumbing is built rather than from any consumer rule. There is exactly one mechanism through which a company can take money from you on a repeating basis without asking each time, and once you know that, an audit that felt like a weekend becomes an hour and a half with three bank statements.
A subscription you cancel is money you keep every month afterwards, and it is worth pairing with something on the other side of the ledger: an app such as I am Beezy credits the same account for the content you view instead of debiting it.
Why can a subscription in Serbia only charge your card?
Two facts about the Serbian payment system, taken together, close off every route except one.
The instant payment system pushes, it never pulls
Serbia's domestic instant payment rail is IPS NBS, operated by the National Bank of Serbia. It runs continuously and it is used at enormous scale: 11,312,229 payments in July 2026, an average of 364,911 a day, each executed in about one second. It is also, structurally, a system in which the payer initiates the transfer. A merchant cannot reach into it and take money on a schedule, which is why no Serbian subscription can be built on it.
SEPA arrived in 2025, but not the half that matters here
Serbia became a SEPA member on 22 May 2025, but only the credit transfer scheme is operational and Serbian banks began executing those transfers in early May 2026. The direct debit scheme, the one that lets a company collect from an account on a recurring basis, is not part of what is running. A European service therefore cannot set up a direct debit against a Serbian account the way it would against an account in the euro area.
What that leaves
Cards, and standing orders you set up yourself in your own banking application. The second category is easy: it is a list you can open in the app, and nothing gets on to it without you. The first category is where the forgotten money lives, and it is a single document per month.
Which of your cards is it even on?
Narrowing it to cards is only useful if you know how many you have and what each one can actually do.
A standard DinaCard cannot pay a foreign service
DinaCard is Serbia's domestic card scheme, issued by the National Bank of Serbia together with the commercial banks since 2003. The standard version works for payments and withdrawals inside Serbia only. A co-badged international version exists, issued with Discover Financial Services or UnionPay International rather than with Visa or Mastercard. The practical consequence for an audit is immediate: a foreign streaming, storage or software subscription is not on your standard DinaCard, so start with the Visa or Mastercard you hold.
There are far more cards in circulation than people
The National Bank reported 12.2 million payment cards issued at the end of 2024, up 5.9 per cent in a year and 28 per cent in five, in a country of about 6.5 million people. In-store card purchases reached 681.7 million in 2024, with an average basket of 2,271 dinars. The relevant point for you is not the total, it is the ratio: most people carry more cards than they think, and a subscription set up two years ago is frequently sitting on the one they no longer use for anything else.
Three months of statements, one pass each
Pull three consecutive monthly statements for every card. One month is not enough, because a quarterly or annual charge will not appear. Go through them looking only for the same merchant name repeating, and write down the date of the month it lands on. That date is the thing you will need later.
| Type of subscription | Where it charges | Where you cancel it |
|---|---|---|
| Foreign streaming, storage, software | A Visa or Mastercard, never a standard DinaCard | The account page of the service itself |
| Serbian telecom or television package | Card, standing order, or an invoice you pay | The operator, under the contract terms |
| Something you set up yourself in the bank app | A standing order from your account | The bank application, in a few taps |
| Anything claiming to direct debit your account | Nothing: the scheme is not operational in Serbia | Treat the claim itself as the problem |
The biggest one is the bundle, and part of it goes unused
Serbia buys internet in packages and mobile on its own
The telecoms regulator, RATEL, publishes market data every quarter, and its first quarter 2026 review shows a pattern that decides where the money is. In fixed broadband, Telekom Srbija holds 58.5 per cent and SBB 26.6 per cent, across 2.19 million subscribers. In content distribution, Telekom Srbija holds 62.3 per cent and SBB 29.0 per cent, across 2.48 million subscribers. And 1.881 million subscriptions are bundles.
The fixed line inside the package
RATEL reports that 83 per cent of internet subscribers take their service as part of a bundle while 96 per cent of mobile subscribers take their line on its own, and that the most common bundle is internet plus fixed telephone plus television at 43.9 per cent. The second most common, internet plus television, sits at 30.1 per cent. Meanwhile 2.11 million fixed lines generate an average of 1.2 minutes of calls a day. The fixed telephone in the middle of the most popular package is, for a great many households, a line that rings and nothing else.
What you can compare, and what nobody publishes
RATEL operates a public market comparison portal at pregledtrzista.rs, which is the right place to start rather than an operator's own marketing page. Be aware of a limit: no comparable public price grid for Serbian operators is available in official sources, so what you can compare reliably is who provides what and at what scale, not a published table of tariffs. For prices, ask each of mts, Yettel, A1 Srbija, SBB and Supernova directly, and ask specifically what the package costs without the fixed line.
| RATEL market data, first quarter 2026 | Figure |
|---|---|
| Fixed broadband subscribers | 2.19 million |
| Internet subscribers who buy in a bundle | 83% |
| Mobile subscribers who buy the line alone | 96% |
| Most common bundle: internet, fixed line and television | 43.9% |
| Average daily calling on 2.11 million fixed lines | 1.2 minutes |
Turning a cancelled subscription into income with I am Beezy
Cancelling stops a charge. The other half of the same exercise is putting something back on the credit side. I am Beezy sits on the other side of the same statement. What you view, videos, articles and advertisements, is what earns, one view at a time, and the payout reaches the payment method you already hold. Regular users report earnings equivalent to 5 to 15 euros a day; across a month that is on the order of 17,600 to 52,800 dinars, taking the official middle rate of 117.3836 dinars to the euro published on 5 August 2026. It lands in the account you have just finished auditing, which makes the change visible on the next statement rather than in a year's time.
The habit is the point
The reason forgotten subscriptions accumulate is that nobody looks at the account except when something goes wrong. Having a reason to open it regularly is, on its own, most of the fix.
The renewal date is the only lever you have
Annual plans renew without saying anything
A yearly plan taken in a burst of enthusiasm renews twelve months later on a day you will not remember. This is why the date you wrote down from the statement matters more than the amount: put each one in a calendar with a reminder a week earlier, and you convert a silent renewal into a decision.
Free trials started in a different month
A trial taken in one month bills in the next, which is exactly why one month of statements is not enough. If you signed up for something free in the last quarter and cannot remember cancelling it, look for it specifically rather than waiting for it to surface.
Cancelling the card does not cancel the contract
Blocking or replacing a card stops the charge from going through. It does not end the agreement, and it does not stop the provider from treating the amount as owed. Cancel with the provider, get the confirmation in writing, and only then worry about the card.
What about the ones billed in euros?
The conversion is yours to absorb
Serbia is not in the euro area, and joining SEPA did not change that. A subscription priced in euros is converted into dinars by your bank at whatever rate applies on the day of the charge, so the amount that leaves your account moves month to month even when the price does not. The dinar is stable against the euro rather than fixed to it: the official middle rate on 5 August 2026 was 117.3836 dinars, and the National Bank publishes a new one each working day.
Compare the debited amount, not the advertised price
When you total up what a foreign subscription actually costs you over a year, use the dinar amounts on the statements rather than the euro price on the website. The gap between the two is small in a stable year and it is still the version of the number that came out of your account.
The ninety-minute audit
In this order
List every card you hold and set the standard DinaCard aside for foreign services. Pull three months of statements for each of the others. Mark every merchant name that appears more than once and write down its date. Open the standing orders list in your banking app and read it. Then take the telecom bill separately and ask your operator what the same package costs without the fixed line, given that the average Serbian fixed line is used for barely a minute a day. Cancel with the provider rather than by killing the card, and put the renewal dates of everything you keep into a calendar. Finally, since the exercise only pays once unless something replaces it, consider putting the recovered amount to work: I am Beezy credits the same account each week instead of quietly draining it.
