How Email Sync Finds All Your Subscriptions in Gmail and Outlook Automatically

When you sign up for a SaaS tool, streaming service, or business app, almost everything important passes through your inbox:

• Welcome emails
• Invoice PDFs and receipts
• “Your plan has renewed” notifications
• “Your card is expiring” notices
• Trial ending and price change warnings

Consumer and business subscription apps increasingly rely on inbox data or SMS to track recurring payments and subscriptions, because those messages contain reliable structured information about vendors, amounts, and billing cycles.

The pattern is proven:

1. Email is the single source of truth for subscriptions.
2. If you can read those billing signals reliably, you can reconstruct the subscription list.

Vendibly takes that same idea and builds it specifically for freelancers, startups, and small teams who need subscription tracking plus renewal intelligence rather than just a consumer bill list.

At a high level, Email sync does four things:

1. Connects to your inbox securely using OAuth (Gmail or Outlook)
2. Scans up to the last 6 months of subscription-related emails
3. Uses AI to extract vendors, amounts, billing periods, and renewal dates
4. Creates structured vendor records and a renewal calendar inside Vendibly

Step 1 – Secure connection via OAuth

When you click Email sync from your onboarding or dashboard:

• You choose Gmail or Outlook / Microsoft 365
• You complete the standard OAuth flow directly with Google or Microsoft
• Vendibly never sees your password and cannot send emails on your behalf

Vendibly only requests the scopes it needs to:

• Read email headers and bodies
• Access invoice attachments and billing messages
• For Pro/Plus, run periodic scans in the background

No sending, deleting, or editing permissions are required.

Step 2 – One-time historical scan

Once OAuth succeeds, Vendibly performs a single historical scan:

• Time window: last 6 months of emails
• Sources:
  • PDF invoices
  • HTML receipts
  • Payment confirmations
  • “Your plan renewed” messages
  • Subscription notifications

Emails are filtered and parsed specifically for vendor subscriptions and contracts, with attachment-first parsing and AI extraction .

For Free users:

• The scan runs once.
• Vendibly disconnects the OAuth token after the scan completes.
• You see “Last scanned: [timestamp] (Vendibly Free)” and a prompt to upgrade if you want ongoing scans .

For Pro / Plus users:

• The same 6-month scan runs on upgrade or first connection.
• OAuth is retained (securely) for ongoing scans.
• You see both “Last scanned” and “Next automatic scan” in the UI .

Step 3 – AI extraction and vendor creation

Behind the scenes, Vendibly uses the VendoIQ parsing layer to turn messy email content into clean vendor records:

For each relevant email, the system tries to extract:

• Vendor name (normalized)
• Amount (and currency, where present)
• Billing period (monthly, yearly, quarterly, etc.)
• Renewal date or next expected charge date
• Status (active, cancelled, trial, expired)
• Contract details when present (uploaded contracts or attached PDFs)

Those fields become structured entries in the Vendors table and feed:

• Your vendor list
• Your renewal calendar
• Your upcoming payments summary
• Risk markers and later AI summaries

Because the logic prioritizes attachment parsing and deduplication, duplicate emails do not create duplicate vendors. Vendor names are normalized and combined with billing periods and dates to avoid clutter.

Step 4 – Weekly incremental scans (Pro / Plus)

On Pro and Plus plans, Vendibly schedules a weekly incremental scan:

• It checks only new emails since the last scan
• It looks for new subscriptions, renewals, invoices, and notices
• It updates vendor records and the renewal calendar with new data

If the user triggers a manual “Scan now” action, they see:

• “Scanning your inbox for new vendors…”
• Then “Scan complete. Next automatic scan: [date].”

This keeps your dashboard up to date with zero ongoing manual work.

Subscriptions and renewals Email sync detects well

Email sync is extremely effective at detecting subscriptions that:

• Send recurring invoices or billing receipts
• Send “your subscription renewed” emails
• Send “your card will be charged on…” style notices
• Send trial ending, upgrade, or downgrade messages

These commonly include:

• SaaS tools (Notion, Slack, Zoom, Canva, HubSpot, Monday, etc.)
• Cloud services (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, hosting, storage)
• Marketing tools (email platforms, analytics, landing page builders)
• Operational tools (CRM, helpdesk, scheduling, payroll add-ons)

Edge cases and manual additions

There are cases where Email sync may not see a subscription:

• The tool never sends invoices or renewal emails
• All communication happens inside an in-app portal
• The subscription is paid via wire with separate offline contracts
• The email address used for billing is different from the email connected

For these, Vendibly lets you:

• Add vendors manually
• Upload contracts that AI will parse and convert into vendor records

Once added, these vendors behave like others in the calendar and reminders.

Inbox access is always the biggest psychological barrier. People worry (rightly) about tools reading the wrong emails or storing sensitive content.

Vendibly’s Email sync is designed so that:

• It uses OAuth for access, meaning you never share your password.
• On Free, tokens are not stored after the one-time scan; there are no background jobs for free users .
• On Pro and Plus, tokens are stored securely to allow weekly scans.
• Access is read-only: no sending, editing, or deleting emails.

Vendibly follows this same principle but applies it directly to:

• Vendor records
• Subscription tracking
• Renewal intelligence

So you get the benefits of automation without handing full control of your inbox to a third party.

Email sync is not just a convenience feature. It powers almost everything else in Vendibly’s product.

Vendor list and dashboard

Every time Email sync detects a vendor, it creates or updates a vendor record with:

• Name
• Renewal date
• Amount
• Billing period
• Status
• Links to relevant emails or contracts

Your dashboard then aggregates this into:

• Total vendors
• Upcoming payments
• Renewals this month
• Timeline events

Renewal calendar and reminders

From extracted renewal dates, Vendibly generates calendar events and sends reminders:

• 7, 3, and 1 days before renewal
• With labels such as Upcoming and Overdue for visual clarity

These events are kept up to date as Email sync discovers new charges or changed billing dates.

AI contract summaries and insights

When you upload contracts or when emails contain attached agreements, Vendibly’s AI layer can:

• Summarize key contract terms
• Highlight renewal type and termination clauses
• Tag vendors as recurring, fixed-term, or one-off

Over time, this contributes to richer insights about your SaaS stack and vendor commitments.

The difference between Free and Pro is simple and very intentional:

Free Plan

• One-time 6-month scan via Email sync
• Up to 5 vendors in your account
• 30-day calendar view
• No background jobs, no ongoing sync; tokens disconnected after scan

This gives a clean snapshot of your current subscriptions and renewals without any ongoing inbox connection.

Pro Plan

• Unlimited vendors
• Continuous inbox sync with weekly scans
• Full-year calendar view
• AI contract summaries and exportable reports (CSV, PDF)

This turns Email sync from a one-time discovery tool into a continuous monitoring system.

You should use Email sync if:

• You have more than a handful of tools and subscriptions
• You pay for software across multiple cards or accounts
• You have ever been surprised by a renewal you forgot about
• You want a complete picture of your SaaS stack without manually listing everything

Compared to manually entering subscriptions into a tracker or spreadsheet, inbox-based discovery gives you a much more accurate baseline and dramatically reduces setup friction. Existing subscription tracking tools in consumer and SMB space report that automating subscription detection is the main reason people adopt them and stay engaged.

Vendibly adds to that by focusing on business-grade vendors, contracts, and renewals rather than just personal media subscriptions.

Email sync is the fastest way to get from “I have no idea what I’m paying for” to “I can see every subscription and renewal in one place.”

By connecting securely to Gmail or Outlook, scanning the last 6 months of receipts and billing emails, and using AI to build structured vendor records, Vendibly turns your inbox into a real subscription intelligence layer for your business.

• No manual data entry
• No hunting through old invoices
• No guessing when renewals are coming

Just connect once, let the scan complete, and let Vendibly handle the subscriptions and renewals you would otherwise miss.