Gradient: Popular face matching app charges you £20 for using it – unless you tell it not to

How to unsubscribe and avoid being hit by a hefty charge for finding out who you look like

Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller talks about the new iPhone 11 Pro during a special event on September 10, 2019 in the Steve Jobs Theater on Apple's Cupertino, California campus (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Gradient, the now incredibly popular app that tells you who you look like, could end up being very expensive.

Though it is free to use, it comes with a short, three-day trial. Once that is over, the app can hit you with a huge charge of £20, each month.

And that will automatically happen, unless users unsubscribe. Thankfully, doing so is easy, though a little complicated and far from obvious.

The app has exploded in popularity over the last few days, as celebrities posted about the app and everyone else rushed to find out which celebrities they look like.

It has led to a flood of posts on Instagram and elsewhere in which users share who the app has decided they look like.

Previous similar apps have led to concern about what is happening to uploaded photographs, and who owns them. But this time around there is a much more immediate and obvious worry: using the app can lead to substantial charges for people who use it.

Thankfully, avoiding those costs is simply a matter of unsubscribing – though actually doing so can be a little complicated. It can be done through the iPhone App Store or the Google Play Store.

Users will still get to use the three-day free trial, but will then avoid being charged after it is over. Subscriptions must be cancelled 24 hours before they are due to start, so within the first two days of using the app.

To unsubscribe on an iPhone, head to the Settings app, click your name at the top, and then choose subscriptions; alternatively, you can click this link, though that might not necessarily work. In that page, you'll see all of your subscriptions, including the one to Gradient.

On Android, open the Google Play Store, press the menu button and choose the Subscriptions option. There you'll have a similar list of all the active subscriptions you have, and you can choose to cancel it.