Renewal Sentinel

Renewal sentinel

Everything that is about to charge, for the next 90 days, with the date you actually have to decide by.

Purpose

Annual renewals are the ones that hurt. They are invisible for eleven months, then land as one large charge, and the notice window that would have let the user out of it closed weeks before the charge appeared. The operative deadline is never the renewal date. It is the notice deadline, typically 30 days earlier, and a reminder set two weeks before renewal is already too late to negotiate [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 3].

The value this skill delivers is lead time, not analysis. A renewal date is interesting. Decision days remaining is actionable.

This works because renewal notices, expiry warnings, registrar dashboards, and annual receipts all pass across the user's screen and Littlebird captures them without any finance integration [references/littlebird-mcp-reference.md, Verified capability receipts].

This is the forward-looking sibling of money-leak-auditor. That skill looks backward at spend that already happened and asks what is wasted. This one looks forward at what is about to charge and asks what the user still has time to stop. Do not run a spend audit here.

Littlebird MCP calls used

Trigger

Invoke when the user says any of: what is renewing soon, upcoming renewals, what is about to charge me, cancel before it renews, my domain is expiring, SSL certificate expiry, annual subscription about to hit, auto-renewal deadline, renewal calendar, cancellation window, what do I need to decide about this month.

Also invoke after the weekly sentinel routine fires with something in its FLAGGED section.

Routine cadence

Weekly, plus on demand. The weekly routine observes and notifies. The on-demand session does the work, drafts, and asks for approvals. See the routine wiring section below.

Capability gate

This skill requires the Littlebird MCP server on a Power or Pro plan.

1. List the available tools before calling anything. Use the real tool names from the live server. references/littlebird-mcp-reference.md records what was verified on 2026-08-17 and is a starting point, not a guarantee.
2. If no Littlebird MCP tools are present, stop and tell the user this skill needs the Littlebird MCP connected. Do not build a renewal calendar from any other source.
3. If tools are present but plan status is in doubt, call LB_INTERNAL_GET_SUBSCRIPTION_STATUS and report what it says.

Evidence standards

Read references/evidence-standards.md before producing output. The rules that govern this skill most directly:

• Every claim carries a receipt in the canonical format [Tuesday, August 11, 2026 23:40 EDT | chrome] (rule 1).
• Every line is observed, inferred, external, or unknown, and which one is visible to the reader (rule 2). A date read off a notice is observed. A date computed from last year's charge is inferred and is written as projected, always, with the basis in parentheses.
• Confidence is stated, and a Low-rated claim never drives an irreversible action (rule 3).
• Capture shows what the user was viewing, not what they bought (rule 4).
• Confirm before encoding, and confirm before sending (rule 6).
• Raw capture never ships (rule 7).
• Sort by event time, not by relevance order (rule 8).
• Empty retrieval ends the run (rule 9).

The rule specific to this skill: absence of evidence is not evidence of no renewal. A vendor with no captured renewal signal is a vendor whose renewal has not been found yet. That is why the output carries a known unknowns section and why it is not optional.

Process

Six phases.

Phase 1: scope and prior state

Ask the user two things with AskUserQuestion:

• Horizon. Default 90 days. Explain that 90 is this skill's convention, derived from the renewal work calendar plus the 30-day notice default, and not a measured optimum [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 7, gap 1].
• Whether this covers personal, business, or both.

Then call LB_INTERNAL_LIST_ROUTINES. If the weekly sentinel exists, call LB_INTERNAL_GET_ROUTINE_REPORTS with limit 8 and read its history before sweeping. Items already flagged there start at the top of this run's calendar.

Phase 2: the sweep

Follow references/renewal-discovery.md. Run query families A through G over 120 days back, then the annual look-back over 13 months for family C only. Run the calendar sweep with LB_INTERNAL_LIST_MEETINGS and a future end_date.

Use several narrow parallel queries rather than one broad one. A broad query against this server returns 70,000-plus characters and gets written to a file instead of returned [references/littlebird-mcp-reference.md, Oversized results].

Deduplicate before counting anything. A single renewal notice appears in a browser tab, an email client, and a notification stack [references/littlebird-mcp-reference.md, Known limitations].

Phase 3: date and amount, with the basis attached

Follow references/renewal-discovery.md, extraction and projection rules.

Every item carries a date basis and an amount basis, and neither is ever blank. A projected date is written as 2026-11-14 (projected from 2025-11-14 charge). The parenthetical is not optional.

Three classes where projection is prohibited: certificates, because the maximum validity term itself changed on 2026-03-15; hosting coming off a promotional term, because the renewal runs 2x to 4x the intro rate by design; and anything the user has said they already cancelled [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, sections 4 and 6].

Phase 4: cancellation windows

Follow references/cancellation-windows.md. This is the phase that produces the field the skill exists for.

For every item compute decision_deadline = renewal_date - notice_window_days and decision_days_left. Record where the window number came from, ranked contract, then vendor terms page, then user-supplied, then the 30-day benchmark default [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 3].

Sort the calendar by decision deadline, not by renewal date. An item renewing in 80 days with a 90-day window is more urgent than an item renewing in 20 days with no window at all.

Where the assumed window is the default, state in the same line that a 60 or 90 day window would mean the deadline has already passed. Do not silently pick one reading when the sources conflict.

Phase 5: domains and certificates, as their own class

Follow references/domain-and-ssl.md. These are ranked by blast radius, never by dollar amount, because a domain expiry stops mail routing and a user with no mail stops receiving the renewal notices for everything else they own [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 5].

Read that guide before writing any expiry deadline. The Redemption Grace Period runs 30 days from deletion, not from expiry, and conflating them puts the deadline roughly a month too late [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 5].

Phase 6: flag, draft, hold

Present the calendar. Ask which items the user wants to act on, with AskUserQuestion. Draft only for those, following references/cancel-and-downgrade-drafts.md.

Do not pre-draft the whole calendar. Most renewals are things the user wants.

Run the approval gate per draft, not per batch. Nothing is sent.

Output

Two files in the working directory, dated with the run date.

renewal-calendar-YYYY-MM-DD.md, containing in this order:

1. Decision deadlines inside 14 days, or already passed. The top of the report.

2. The 90-day forward calendar, one row per item, sorted by decision deadline:

   Column	Contents
   Decision by	The notice deadline, with days remaining
   Renewal date	The date, and (projected from ...) where inferred
   Item	Vendor or domain, as captured
   Class	domain, certificate, hosting, API plan, software, other
   Est. amount	As shown, or a range, or not captured
   Confidence	High, Medium, Low, per references/evidence-standards.md rule 3
   Window basis	contract, vendor terms, user-supplied, or assumed default
   Evidence receipt	Canonical format, per rule 1
   Action	keep, cancel, downgrade, negotiate, investigate

3. Domain and certificate section, ranked by blast radius with the lifecycle deadlines spelled out per item.

4. Known unknowns, listing every vendor the user confirmed they pay for where no renewal date was found, each with the windows and queries swept, the last observation of any kind, and the one action that would close the gap.

5. What was searched, the windows, the query families, and the filters, so a reader can judge the sweep.

renewal-drafts-YYYY-MM-DD.md, one drafted message per flagged item, each headed STATUS: HELD FOR APPROVAL. Not sent.

If the user names a different location, use it. If nothing was found, write only the calendar file and have it say what was searched and what came back empty.

Empty retrieval branch

If families A through E return nothing across the whole window, the run ends. Write the calendar file with the date windows searched, the exact queries and filters run, the statement that no renewal or expiry evidence was found in that window, and what would change the outcome: a wider window, a period when the user was actually doing billing, or a check that Littlebird capture was running.

Do not reconstruct a plausible renewal calendar from what a business of this shape usually buys [references/evidence-standards.md, rule 9].

If the sweep returns nothing even for items the user has just named as annual subscriptions, suspect the sweep, not the stack. Check the date window and the filter values and report the malfunction.

Guardrail

A wrong renewal date is worse than no renewal date, and this skill generates dates by inference.

A user who trusts a projected date and finds it was a month early loses nothing. A user who trusts a projected date that was a month late has already been charged, and they stopped watching because this skill told them they had time. That asymmetry governs every design rule here:

• A projected date always says it is projected, in the same cell as the date.
• A projected date is Medium confidence at best, and Low from a single OCR fragment.
• Where the notice window is assumed rather than known, the entry states what a longer window would mean, because the failure mode is always an assumed window that was too short.
• Certificates and promotional-term hosting are never projected at all.
• The known unknowns section exists so that a short calendar is never mistaken for a complete one.

The second guardrail, on the legal side: there is no federal click-to-cancel rule in force. The FTC's 2024 revised Negative Option Rule was vacated in its entirety by the Eighth Circuit in Custom Communications, Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission on 2025-07-08, on the procedural ground that the Commission had not performed the required preliminary regulatory analysis. A replacement is at advance-notice-of-rulemaking stage, announced 2026-03-11 with comments closed 2026-04-13, so there is no proposed rule text and no compliance date. The Negative Option Rule that does remain in force dates from 1973 and covers prenotification plans such as product-of-the-month clubs, not SaaS auto-renewals. Federal enforcement runs through ROSCA and Section 5 of the FTC Act [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 1].

Never tell a user federal law requires their vendor to make cancellation easy. Never say the rule was struck down on the merits; it was vacated on procedure and the court did not reach the substance. Never predict what the replacement will require. Real cancellation-ease obligations come from state law, principally California, or from the vendor's own contract [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, sections 1 and 2]. No drafted message cites any of it [references/cancel-and-downgrade-drafts.md].

Never draft-and-send

The skill drafts. The user sends. There is no path through this skill that transmits anything to a vendor.

Do not call an email tool. Do not open a compose surface and fill it. Do not offer to send as a convenience. Every draft goes into renewal-drafts-YYYY-MM-DD.md headed STATUS: HELD FOR APPROVAL. Not sent. and the run stops at the approval gate [references/evidence-standards.md, rule 6].

Gmail, Outlook, helpdesks and the rest are separate MCP servers that may or may not be connected here. List available tools before assuming any of them exists, and when none is present produce the copy-and-paste drafts file, which is the normal case and costs nothing.

Voice

Drafts are written as the user. Check whether a personal voice skill is installed in this session and use it if present. If none is installed, say so plainly in the drafts file and write in plain, direct business prose. Never invent a voice profile from capture; point the user at this marketplace's voice creator skills instead.

Routine wiring: the weekly renewal sentinel

The on-demand run is the primary mode. The weekly routine is a cheap observer that watches the horizon between runs and hands off when something enters it.

Offer to create it. Routines can be created from an interactive session; only a running routine is blocked from creating them [references/littlebird-mcp-reference.md, Routine tools]. Show the user the exact prompt text and schedule below, get approval with AskUserQuestion, then call LB_INTERNAL_CREATE_ROUTINE. Do not tell the user to go set it up by hand.

Call LB_INTERNAL_LIST_ROUTINES first. If a sentinel already exists, do not create a second one; call LB_INTERNAL_GET_ROUTINE_CONFIG and offer an update instead, remembering that prompt and schedule each replace the whole field [references/littlebird-mcp-reference.md, Routine tools].

Title: Renewal sentinel

Schedule: {"frequency": "weekly", "week_days": ["MO"], "time": "07:30"}

Notifications: enable push. Enable email if the user wants a copy.

Prompt text, verbatim:

You are a weekly renewal sentinel. Your job is to watch the next 90 days for anything about
to auto-charge or expire. You do not run a full sweep, you do not draft anything, and you do
not contact any vendor.

FIRST, before searching, call LB_INTERNAL_GET_ROUTINE_REPORTS for this routine with limit 8
and read your own previous reports. You need them to tell a new item from a repeated one and
to escalate correctly. Do not skip this step.

Then do two retrievals.

RETRIEVAL 1. Search the user's captured context for the last 14 days, using several narrow
queries rather than one broad one, covering:
- Renewal notices: "your subscription renews on", "your plan will automatically renew",
  "annual renewal reminder", "we will charge your card on", "your next payment is scheduled
  for".
- Expiry warnings: "your domain is expiring", "domain expiration notice renew now", "your
  certificate expires on", "SSL certificate expiring in days", "your plan expires on".
- Price changes: "we are updating our pricing", "your plan is changing price", "price
  increase effective".
- Trial conversions: "your trial ends and you will be charged", "credits expire on".
Also search message threads for "subscription renewing", "card will be charged", "domain
expires".

RETRIEVAL 2. Call LB_INTERNAL_LIST_MEETINGS with a start date of today and an end date 90
days in the future. Read the event titles for renewal reminders the user set for themselves.
Upcoming events carry no summary and no transcript, so read the titles directly.

Write a report with exactly these five sections.

DECIDE THIS WEEK
Any item whose cancellation deadline falls inside the next 14 days, or has already passed.
For each: item, renewal date, the deadline, days remaining, and the evidence receipt in the
form [Weekday, Month D, YYYY HH:MM TZ | app]. Where you do not know the notice window, say
you assumed 30 days and say plainly that a 60 or 90 day window would mean the deadline has
already passed. This section goes first even when it is empty; if it is empty, say "nothing
inside 14 days".

NEW ON THE HORIZON
Renewals and expiries that entered the 90-day window since your last report. An item is NEW
only if it does not appear in any previous report you just read. Give the item, the date, the
amount if the capture showed one, and the receipt. Never state an amount the capture did not
show; write "amount not captured" instead.

DOMAINS AND CERTIFICATES
These are separate and they are ranked by what breaks, not by price. A domain expiry stops
email as well as the website, which means the user stops receiving every other renewal notice
too. A certificate expiry is an instant full outage. List any domain or certificate expiry
inside 90 days first, then anything inside 120 days as an early warning. Do not project a
certificate expiry from a previous year: the maximum certificate validity period changed on
2026-03-15 from 398 days to 200 days, so last year's date does not predict this year's.

PRICE MOVED
Any observed price change on something that renews, with old and new amounts only where the
capture showed both, and the receipt.

STILL UNKNOWN
Anything you expected to see and did not, in one or two lines. Absence of a renewal notice is
not evidence that nothing is renewing.

ESCALATION RULE. Compare against the previous reports you read at the start.
- An item appearing for the SECOND consecutive week: mark it REPEAT and say how many days of
  decision time have been lost since you first raised it.
- An item appearing for the THIRD consecutive week or more: mark it ESCALATED, move it to the
  top of the report, state how many days remain, and say plainly that notification is not
  working and this needs a decision now.
- An item whose deadline has PASSED since your last report: mark it MISSED, say what it will
  now cost, and stop tracking it after one more report.
- An item that resolved since the last report: say so in one line and stop tracking it.
Never report the same item in the same words two weeks running. If nothing has changed, say
nothing has changed and give the new days-remaining number, which has changed by seven.

LEGAL ACCURACY. Do not tell the user that federal law requires a vendor to make cancellation
easy. There is no federal click-to-cancel rule in force: the FTC rule was vacated in July
2025 and its replacement is at advance-notice-of-rulemaking stage. Do not cite it.

HANDOFF. End every report with this line, adjusted for what you found:
"Open Cowork and run renewal-sentinel for the full calendar and drafts. This week's priority:
X." Where X is the single item with the least decision time remaining, with domain and
certificate expiries outranking dollar amounts.

If the searches return nothing, say so plainly, name the window you searched, and stop. Do
not fill the report from what you would expect a business like this to be renewing.

How the handoff works. The routine observes and notifies. It cannot approve, draft, or write files. The user opens Cowork, invokes this skill, and phase 1 reads the sentinel's own history with LB_INTERNAL_GET_ROUTINE_REPORTS, which gives the on-demand run a change log it would otherwise have to rebuild [references/littlebird-mcp-reference.md, The Routines-observe, Cowork-acts pattern].

When invoked after a sentinel alert, read the last 8 reports first. Items marked REPEAT or ESCALATED go to the top of the calendar regardless of their decision deadline.

Calibration and honesty notes

• The 90-day horizon is this skill's convention. No source in the archive measures the optimal renewal lead time [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 7, gap 1]. Present it as a convention and let the user move it.
• The 30-day notice default rests on the only archived figure with a stated dataset, 84% of auto-renewing cloud service agreements in a corpus of more than 10,000 [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 3]. Other sources put the band at 30 to 90 days. The conflict is reported, not smoothed.
• Do not apply the 30-day window to a self-serve credit-card plan. Those frequently have no notice requirement and cancel effective at the end of the term [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 3].
• Use 5% to 8% as the escalator projection basis, not 12% to 18%. Only the first has a stated dataset behind it [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, sections 3 and 4].
• Every quantitative source in the archive describes enterprise or mid-market buyers, and the dollar figures explicitly describe contracts of $30,000 to $120,000. Nothing in the archive calibrates a one-person business [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 7, gap 2]. Do not quote those dollar figures to a solo operator.
• Nine of fifteen archived sources sell renewal tracking, SaaS management, certificate automation, contract tooling, or hosting, and each has a commercial interest in these problems looking large [references/research/README.md]. Quote their figures as vendor estimates.
• Everything legal in this archive is United States law. A user with a European or United Kingdom vendor relationship gets nothing from it [references/research/distilled-renewal-and-expiry-practice.md, section 7, gap 7]. Say so rather than generalising.

Related skills

Ship Gate removed, research-only skill, produces no committable code.

Reference map