Subscription Cost Audit Calculator

The subscription creep problem

Nobody decides to spend $200 a month on subscriptions. It accumulates one $11 charge at a time, each one small enough not to think about, and the total is invisible because it never arrives as a single bill.

That is the whole mechanism. A charge you would refuse as a lump sum is easy to accept as a monthly, and once accepted it renews by default forever. Surveys consistently find people underestimate their own subscription spending by a factor of two or three, and the gap is almost always made of things they had genuinely forgotten they were paying for.

$200 a month is $2,400 a year, and $24,000 over a decade.

How to Do a Subscription Audit

1. Pull your last 2-3 bank and credit card statements
2. Highlight every recurring charge
3. For each one, ask: “Did I use this in the past 30 days?”
4. Cancel anything you answer “no” to immediately

Subscription Categories

• Video Streaming: Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple TV+
• Music: Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music
• Cloud Storage: iCloud, Google One, Dropbox, OneDrive
• Software/Apps: Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, password managers
• Fitness/Wellness: gym membership, Peloton, meditation apps, fitness apps
• News/Content: NYT, WSJ, Kindle Unlimited, Audible, Substack
• Gaming: Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Nintendo Switch Online, PC Game Pass
• Other: food delivery memberships, shopping perks, VPN, antivirus

The use-it-or-lose-it rule

If you have not opened it in 30 days, cancel it. The reasoning is simple: whatever stopped you using it last month is probably still true, and almost every one of these can be resubscribed in under a minute if you turn out to be wrong. The cost of cancelling something you did want is one minute. The cost of keeping something you did not is indefinite.

Two practical notes

Many services offer a retention discount when you start to cancel, so it is worth going through the cancellation flow even on things you intend to keep. And annual billing typically saves 15 to 25% against monthly, which is real money on the one or two you are certain about, and a trap on anything you might otherwise have dropped in March.

On the ten-year figure this page shows: it assumes prices hold, and they will not. Subscription prices have risen steadily and the increases arrive without a decision from you. Treat the ten-year number as a floor.