A Subscription Audit You Can Finish in One Sitting
Subscriptions are sneaky because $4.99 feels harmless until it has seven friends. Set aside 45 minutes, a drink, and your banking app. The goal is not to become a monk who owns one streaming service; it’s to make sure every recurring charge earns its seat at the table.
Pull the last 90 days
Open your checking account and credit-card statements, then search for terms like “monthly,” “recurring,” “subscription,” and “membership.” Also check PayPal, Apple ID subscriptions, and Google Play. Those are excellent hiding places for apps you downloaded during a brief, optimistic fitness phase.
Make a simple note with four columns: service, monthly cost, last used, and cancel/keep. Include annual charges divided by 12. A $120 Costco membership is $10 per month; a $139 Amazon Prime plan is about $11.58.
Sort charges into three buckets
Use this fast decision rule:
- Keep: used weekly or saves more money than it costs.
- Pause: useful, but not useful this month.
- Cancel: forgotten, duplicated, or “someday” territory.
For example, keep Spotify Premium if you use it daily on your commute. Pause Audible if three unfinished audiobooks are waiting. Cancel one of two cloud-storage plans if both iCloud+ and Google One are backing up the same photos.
Be especially suspicious of free-trial conversions. A $14.99 Canva Pro plan and a $9.99 meditation app do not look dramatic separately. Together, plus a $15.49 Netflix plan, they become nearly $500 a year.
Cancel while the evidence is fresh
Do cancellations immediately, not “after dinner.” Most services let you retain access through the current billing period, so canceling now rarely means losing what you already paid for.
Take a screenshot of each confirmation page and write the cancellation date beside the charge. If a company makes cancellation weirdly difficult, search your email for the original receipt; it often identifies whether you subscribed through Apple, Google, Roku, or directly.
Then set one calendar reminder: “subscription audit” for the first Saturday of every January and July. Twice yearly is enough for most households.
Give the savings a job
Add the monthly total of your cancellations, then move that exact amount automatically. If you cut $37 per month, send $37 to a high-yield savings account or toward your credit-card balance. Otherwise, the money tends to evaporate into takeout, which is a subscription with worse customer support.
FAQ
What if I’m unsure whether to cancel? Pause it for one billing cycle. If you genuinely miss it, restart it; nearly every service will happily take you back.