The subscription audit that saved $340 a month

A reader sent me his bank statement last month. He asked me to find “the leaks”.

I found $340 a month in active subscriptions. He’d used two of them in the last 60 days.

The rest: three streaming services he forgot about, a meditation app he opened twice, a cloud storage plan he didn’t need, a fitness app auto-renewed from a January resolution, a premium news site he read once.

This is not laziness. It’s design.

This has a name. It’s called forced continuity. The industry term is literally that. Subscriptions are engineered so cancelling is harder than signing up, so bills come out of cards not direct debits where you’d notice them, and so price increases happen quietly between billing cycles.

A 2024 study found that 28% of Netflix subscribers in the US are paying for the service but not actually using it.

Not cancelling. Not pausing. Just paying. Every month.

Netflix isn't unique here. The same study found Disney+ at 27.6% and Amazon Prime Video at 26%. Across the board, roughly one in four people paying for a streaming service aren't watching it.

This isn't a Netflix problem. It's a decision problem.

The subscription felt fine when you signed up. It still feels fine every month because $15 doesn't hurt enough to act on. But $15 a month is $180 a year. Times three services you don't use: $540 gone on autopilot.

Source: IndieWire, August 2024

Rule
If you haven’t used a subscription in 30 days, cancel it. You can always resubscribe. That’s the whole point of subscriptions.

Action for this week
Open your bank app. Filter the last 30 days by recurring charges. List every subscription. Cancel the ones you can’t remember using this month.

Next week
How big an emergency fund actually needs to be.

Know someone paying for apps they don’t use? Forward this.

P.S. The average person finds $180 a month in dead subscriptions when they actually check. That’s $2,160 a year. For nothing.