Subscriptions are designed to be forgotten. They are small enough individually that none of them feels worth the effort of cancelling, they renew silently, and the ones you stop using do not announce themselves — they simply keep charging. Most people can name their expensive subscriptions from memory and are wrong about the total.
List what you pay for below and mark how often you actually use each one. The audit totals the annual cost and separates out the services you said you rarely or never open, because those are the ones where cancelling costs you nothing at all.
This is for anyone who could not name their monthly subscription total within $30. It is not a budgeting app and it does not connect to your bank — you type in what you know, which is the point: the gap between what you remember paying for and what you actually pay for is the thing being measured.
This calculator needs JavaScript. You can do the same thing on paper: list every subscription with its monthly cost, add them up, multiply by twelve, then circle the ones you have not used in the last month. The circled total is what you are paying to keep options open.
How the recommendation works
The audit does not judge whether a subscription is good value — only you can decide whether a service you use daily is worth its price. What it can tell you is which services you are paying for without using, and that turns on one question: when did you last open it?
Anything you marked as used rarely or not since I signed up is treated as a cancellation candidate. That is a deliberately low bar. A service you open a few times a month is doing something for you; a service you have not opened since you signed up is a standing order for nothing.
The totals assume prices stay flat, which they will not. Subscription prices have risen faster than general inflation for most of the last decade, so treat the annual figure as a floor rather than a forecast.
A worked example
Five services, which is fewer than most households carry:
- Netflix, $15.99 — used most days
- Spotify, $11.99 — used weekly
- Cloud storage, $2.99 — used most days
- Gym membership, $45.00 — used rarely
- Creative software, $59.99 — not since signing up
That is $135.96 a month, or $1,631.52 a year. The two nobody is using come to $104.99 a month — $1,259.88 a year, or 77% of the total.
The shape of that result is the normal one, and it is why guessing does not work. The services being used are the cheap ones. The ones quietly costing real money are the gym you meant to start going to and the software you needed once. Neither feels like a big monthly decision, which is exactly how both survived.
What to do with the number
The temptation after an audit like this is to cancel everything on the list in one sitting, feel good about it, and resubscribe to half of it within three months. A more durable approach is to cancel the largest unused subscription first, wait a full billing cycle, and notice whether you missed it. You almost always will not, and the evidence makes the next cancellation easier.
Two practical notes. Cancelling at the start of a billing period usually means you keep access until it ends, so there is rarely anything to gain by waiting. And a service that offers you a discount to stay is telling you what it thinks you are worth as a customer — that offer will still be there next year if you want it.
If the total surprised you, the same instinct applies more broadly than subscriptions. Our spending guides cover the rest of the recurring costs that quietly set the floor on what you can save, and the debt payoff calculator shows what redirecting a freed-up monthly amount is actually worth.