I did a thing this week that I've been putting off since basically January: I actually sat down with a bank statement and went line by line through every subscription hitting my card. Took maybe forty minutes. Genuinely could not tell you where twenty of those minutes went because I kept stopping to go "wait, I'm still paying for that?"
The final tally was embarrassing. $9.99 for iCloud+ at 2TB, which fine, I use that. $12.99 for a meal planning app I opened exactly twice, both times in February, both times to look at a recipe I could've just googled. $6 a month for a "pro" weather app because at some point three years ago I got mad at the default one during a hurricane and never looked back. And then the one that actually made me laugh out loud alone in my kitchen: $4.99/month for a QR code generator. A QR code generator. I have been paying five dollars a month, for going on fourteen months now, for something that is a free feature in about six apps already on my phone.
Total damage once I added it all up: just under $71 a month in stuff I wasn't using, wasn't going to use, and in two cases had genuinely forgotten existed. Call it $850 a year. Not life-changing money, but its the kind of number that makes you feel a little sick, the way finding a parking ticket under your wiper does even when you can afford it.
Why this keeps happening
Part of it is just that the friction to cancel is engineered to be worse than the friction to sign up. You know this already, everyone knows this already, and yet the free trial always seems worth the thirty seconds of card-entry now versus the four minutes of navigating a cancellation flow later. I don't think there's a clever fix for this beyond doing the audit. Apps that promise to "find and cancel your subscriptions for you" mostly want read access to your bank feed, which, no thanks, I'll do the forty minutes myself.
The other part, and this is the bit I actually wanted to write about, is that a lot of these were tools I subscribed to because at the time they solved a real annoyance, and then a free or built-in alternative quietly caught up and I never noticed. The weather app is the clearest example. Whatever was wrong with the stock app in 2023 got fixed at some point and I just never went back to check. I was paying rent on a grudge.
I ended up keeping four subscriptions out of eleven. iCloud, obviously. A password manager, which I'd cancel a limb before I'd cancel. A code editor plugin I use basically every workday. And, slightly reluctantly, a note-taking app that I could probably replace with plain markdown files in a folder someday but haven't gotten around to, and honestly the sync just works well enough that I keep not bothering.
If you haven't done this in a while, I'd genuinely recommend the forty minutes. Not because subscriptions are evil (my password manager subscription is doing real work) but because the list drifts without you noticing, and the drift is never toward less spending. Set a recurring reminder for it even, every six months, calendar invite and everything. I'm putting one in right now actually, for late October, before I write this post again in six months and pretend I didn't already know all this.
One thing I didn't cancel that I probably should have: a stock ticker widget subscription my dad gave me as a gift two years ago that I've never had the heart to tell him I don't check. That one's staying on the card. Some costs aren't really about the money.