The moment it dawns on you
There’s a specific feeling you get when you properly look at your bank statement and start totting up all the little recurring charges. A fiver here. Twelve quid there. Oh, and that one you forgot you even signed up for. It adds up faster than you’d expect, and before long you’re looking at a chunk of your monthly income that’s quietly disappearing into services you may or may not actually be using.
Subscriptions are designed to feel painless. That’s the point. Small monthly amounts are easy to overlook, easy to justify, and very easy to just leave ticking over indefinitely. But that’s not the same as saying they’re worth it.
Why they’re so easy to lose track of
Part of the problem is that subscriptions rarely arrive all on the same day. You’ve got things billed on the 3rd, the 12th, the 22nd, some monthly, some annually, some that crept up in price without you really noticing. It’s genuinely difficult to keep a clear picture in your head of what the total actually is.
One thing I do to help with this is keep as many of my subscriptions as possible running through my Apple account. The main reason is practical: the Apple subscriptions page shows you everything in one place, and more importantly, cancelling something takes about ten seconds. You’re not hunting around for a login you set up three years ago or navigating a website that makes cancelling deliberately awkward. It’s just there, easy to manage. If you’re on Android, Google Play does the same job. The point is to keep things consolidated somewhere you’ll actually look.
The free trial trap
Free trials are brilliant when you use them properly and a nuisance when you don’t. The way to use them properly is simple: the moment you sign up for a 30 day trial, set a diary reminder for day 28. Not day 30, day 28. That gives you a couple of days to actually think about whether you want to keep it, rather than suddenly realising the trial ended yesterday and you’ve just been charged.
Even if you decide you do want to keep something, it’s often worth going through the cancellation process anyway before you commit. This might sound counterintuitive, but quite a few services will offer you a discount the moment you try to leave. I’ve seen this work with NOW, Disney, Audible and Paramount, among others. You click cancel, they offer you a reduced rate to stay, you either take it or you don’t. Either way, you’re better off than if you’d just renewed without asking.
Do you actually need them all at the same time?
This is one that I think a lot of people don’t consider. If you’ve got five streaming services, are you genuinely watching all five this month? There’s only so much TV any one person can watch.
My approach when things get a bit subscription-heavy is to rotate. If I’ve got too many TV services running at once, I’ll cancel a couple, watch what I actually want on the ones that are left, then the following month swap them out. HBO Max got cut this month, for example. It’ll come back when there’s something worth watching on it. This way you get access to everything over time without paying for everything at once.
Sharing can make sense, but check the small print
It’s also worth thinking about whether you can share any subscriptions. If you live with a partner and you’ve both got separate Netflix accounts, for instance, that’s an obvious place to look. One subscription between two people is considerably cheaper than two subscriptions.
That said, the terms around account sharing vary between services and have tightened up in recent years. Netflix is a good example of this: they used to be pretty relaxed about it, but they’ve since introduced charges for sharing with people who don’t live at your address, and they do enforce it. So it’s worth reading the small print before assuming sharing is straightforward. Sometimes it works out cleanly, sometimes it’s more complicated than it’s worth.
Actually add it all up
The most useful thing you can do is stop estimating and actually see the number. Ten pounds here, fifteen there, it sounds manageable when you think about each one individually. When you see the monthly total written down, it can be a different story entirely.
I built a free subscription cost calculator on the site to make this easier. You can add in all your subscriptions, see what they’re costing you monthly and annually, and start thinking about what’s genuinely worth keeping. It’s not about cancelling everything, it’s about making a conscious decision rather than just letting it all roll on by default.
Have a go and see what your number comes out at. It might surprise you.
For more on understanding and changing everyday spending habits, take a look at my spending habits guide.