How much have I spent online this year?

You do not have one shopping account. You have an Amazon account, a Shein account, a DoorDash account, an App Store subscription list, a couple of Shopify checkouts you used once, a hotel booking, two ticket purchases and a Prime renewal that went through without anyone noticing. Every one of those companies knows exactly what you spent with them. None of them knows, or wants to tell you, what you spent everywhere else.

Your bank is the closest thing to a central record, but it flattens the interesting part. A card statement shows a merchant descriptor and an amount, then buckets it into "Shopping" or "Restaurants". That tells you a category total. It does not tell you that you ordered from the same brand thirty-four times, that a subscription you forgot renewed in March, or that a category you thought was occasional is actually a third of your orders.

Amazon does let you do this. In Your Account, open Your Orders and switch to the year filter, or use the Order History Report, which exports your orders to a spreadsheet you can total in one formula. It is the cleanest single-retailer answer available, and it usually surprises people.

But it is one retailer. Once you have your Amazon number, the natural next question is whether Amazon is even your biggest line, and nothing on Amazon can answer that. Most people who run the export discover their real problem is somewhere else entirely: food delivery, fast fashion, or a stack of small subscriptions that never appear as a single number anywhere.

There is exactly one record that spans every brand you bought from: your email. Every checkout, on every site, sends a confirmation. Shipping notices, delivery receipts, booking references, renewal notices. Almost nobody deletes them, which means most inboxes quietly contain a complete, dated, multi-year archive of consumption.

Reading that archive does not require reading your mail. A sender address and a subject line are enough to recognize "this was an order from this brand, on this date". What you bought and what it cost lives in the body, and stays untouched. The pattern is recoverable without the details, which is the whole point of doing it this way.

The dollar total is the least interesting output. What changes behavior is the shape of the year: how many distinct brands you bought from, which one you keep coming back to and for how long, which category quietly takes the largest share, and which brand you were loyal to until you silently stopped.

That is closer to a fitness tracker than to a budgeting app. A budget tells you what you should have done. A recap of your own history tells you what you actually did, which is both harder to argue with and considerably more interesting to look at.

If you want the manual version: export your Amazon order history, pull your Apple and Google subscription lists, then filter your inbox for order confirmations from the last twelve months and count the distinct senders. It works, and it takes an evening.

The faster version is what Boxumer does. It connects to your inbox read-only, recognizes the brands behind your order emails, and gives you back your year: brand count, your number one, your category split and the consumer type your orders add up to. It takes about a minute, no account needed. Outlook, Hotmail, Live and Microsoft 365 work today; Gmail is in closed testing.