Subgrove vs Bobby: The Honest Comparison for 2026

If you're comparing Subgrove vs Bobby, you're choosing between two apps that agree on the important thing: subscriptions should be tracked manually, without handing an app a live connection to your bank. Neither one asks for bank credentials. Neither one runs your transactions through an aggregator. So this isn't a privacy-vs-automation debate — it's a subtler question about which private manual tracker fits the devices you actually own.

Let's be fair up front, because it matters: Bobby is excellent, and on a straight price-per-device basis it beats us. Here's the honest breakdown of where each one wins.

Subgrove vs Bobby at a glance

	Bobby	Subgrove
Platforms	iOS only	iPhone, Android, desktop (PWA)
Bank linking	No	No
Price	~$2.99 one-time	Free up to 5; $1.99/mo, $10/yr, or $15 lifetime
Free tier	Limited free, one-time unlock	Yes — 5 subscriptions free
Multi-currency	Basic	Yes, normalized into one total
Family / shared	No	Yes
Calendar view	No	Yes
Offline	Yes	Yes
Data across devices	Single device	Installs on every device

Prices as of this writing and subject to change.

Where Bobby wins

Let's not bury it. Bobby is cheaper, and it's beautiful. Its one-time unlock — around $2.99 for unlimited subscriptions — is about the lowest price anywhere, and there's no recurring fee to think about ever again. If you value paying once and never seeing another charge, Bobby's pricing is genuinely hard to beat, and our Bobby review doesn't pretend otherwise.

It's also a lovely piece of native iOS craft. The animations, the widgets, the general feel of the thing — it's the kind of app people keep on their home screen because they enjoy opening it. It remains actively available (v3.10.x as of late 2025) with a strong App Store rating built up over years.

If you own an iPhone, you're the only person tracking these subscriptions, and you never touch Android or a laptop for this — Bobby might simply be the right answer, and you can stop reading here. We'd rather tell you that than talk you into switching for no reason.

Where Subgrove wins

The moment your situation is any more complicated than "one iPhone, one person," Bobby's single biggest limitation starts to bite: it only exists on iOS. No Android app, no web version, no desktop. That's fine until it isn't:

• Mixed-device households. If one of you is on Android and one on iPhone, Bobby can't be the shared source of truth. Subgrove is a PWA, so the same tracker installs on iPhone and Android and desktop, from one list.
• Family and shared subscriptions. A lot of subscriptions are split — the family streaming plan, the shared cloud storage. Bobby has no shared view; Subgrove has family sharing so everyone sees the same renewals.
• Multiple currencies. If you pay for some services in your home currency and others in USD, Subgrove's multi-currency tracking folds them into one honest monthly total instead of leaving you to do the conversion in your head.
• A calendar of renewals. Bobby gives you a list; Subgrove also gives you a calendar view so you can see the month's charges laid out and spot the clusters.
• Your data surviving a lost phone. Bobby's list lives on the device. Subgrove's installs everywhere, so a new phone doesn't mean re-entering everything.

There's also a genuine free tier: five subscriptions, no unlock required, so you can run the whole workflow before deciding whether it's worth $15 for lifetime access.

The honest trade-off

Here's the plain version. Bobby is the better deal for a single iPhone user — cheaper, gorgeous, pay-once. Subgrove is the better fit the moment more than one device or more than one person is involved — because a tracker that only lives on one phone can't be the household's shared, cross-platform source of truth, no matter how nice it looks.

Both of us share the thing that actually matters: your subscriptions stay a list you typed, not a feed pulled from your bank. Whichever you pick, you're avoiding the bank-linking trade-off that the automated apps ask you to make.

So which should you choose?

• Choose Bobby if you're iPhone-only, tracking just for yourself, and want the cheapest, prettiest pay-once option.
• Choose Subgrove if you use more than one kind of device, share subscriptions with family, juggle more than one currency, or just want your list to exist somewhere other than a single phone.

Not sure yet what you're even paying across all of it? Start with the free subscription cost calculator — add everything up in two minutes, then decide which tracker to keep it in. Or sign up and put your first five subscriptions in Subgrove for free.