I did something this weekend I've been putting off since basically January: I sat down with a spreadsheet and every bank and credit card statement from the last three months and wrote down every single recurring charge I'm paying for. Not the big obvious ones like rent or the phone bill. The little ones. The ones that hide.
The final number was $187.42 a month. I actually said "oh come on" out loud, alone, in my kitchen, at like 9pm on a Sunday.
Some of it I expected. Cloud storage, a couple of streaming services, the domain renewal for this blog (which, fine, I will always pay, that one's sacred). But then there's the stuff that had just quietly kept renewing for years. A photo backup app I switched away from in 2023 and apparently never actually canceled, just stopped opening — $4.99 a month, times roughly 32 months, so call it 160 dollars I handed to a company for a service I wasn't using. A "pro" weather app upgrade I bought once during a hurricane scare because I panicked and wanted radar overlays, which somehow turned into an annual subscription I never noticed on my statement because it bills once a year in a month I never check closely. A meditation app I used maybe four times total.
None of this is a hot take about subscription fatigue being bad, everyone already knows that, there've been a thousand posts about it. What actually got me was how much of it wasn't a decision. I didn't sit down and choose to keep paying for the photo app. I just never un-chose it. The default in almost every one of these products is "keep charging the card until the human actively intervenes," and the human, being a human with a job and a dog and dishes to do, mostly doesn't intervene. The friction is entirely on the cancel side and basically zero on the sign-up side, and that asymmetry is the whole business model for a shocking number of these companies. I don't think that's some grand conspiracy, it's just what happens when you let a metric like "monthly retained subscribers" be the thing everyone's bonus is tied to.
Anyway. I canceled six things. Kept eight. The keeper list, for anyone curious because I know somebody's going to ask in the comments: cloud storage (need it, use it daily), two streaming services instead of the four I had (I picked based on what my partner and I actually finished watching, not what we'd added to a list six months ago and forgotten), a password manager (non-negotiable, everyone should pay for one of these, I will die on this hill), a news site subscription, this blog's hosting and domain, a VPN I use maybe twice a month but keep for the two times a year it actually matters, and my RSS reader's paid tier, which is $30 a year and honestly one of the best deals I'm still getting in 2026 given how much I actually use it every single morning with coffee.
The bigger realization, and this is the part that's stuck with me more than the dollar figure, is that I have no idea what half of this stuff even does anymore in terms of updates. Some of these apps have shipped features I never looked at. I'm sure at least two of them added some kind of AI summarization thing at some point in the last year because that's what every app has done, whether it needed it or not, and I genuinely could not tell you what it does in either of mine because I never opened the changelog. That's its own weird thing about this era — the update log has become something almost nobody reads, which feels backwards from how excited we all used to get about version numbers back when I started this blog.
I'm not going to pretend I'll do this audit every quarter like some productivity blogger would tell you to. I know myself. I'll probably do it again in maybe fourteen months when the credit card statement finally annoys me enough again. But if you haven't looked at your own recurring charges in a while, genuinely, go look. Not to become a minimalist about it, I'm not trying to convert anyone to some no-subscriptions lifestyle, some of this stuff is worth every cent. Just go look. The photo app alone paid for a very nice dinner out that I never got to have.