📺 Subscription Audit Calculator

A 20-minute audit that actually works

Almost nobody can list their subscriptions from memory, and the gap between what people guess and what they are charged is the whole problem. Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends survey put average US household spending on video streaming alone at around $61 a month — and that is before music, cloud storage, fitness apps, news, software and the delivery memberships most people forget entirely. Here is the process that finds all of it.

1. Search your bank statements, not your inbox. Look back twelve months, not one — annual renewals are the charges people miss, and they are usually the largest. Search for the words “monthly”, “renewal”, “subscription”, and the names of the app stores.
2. Check app store and platform billing separately. A large share of subscriptions bill through Apple, Google or Amazon and appear on statements only as a store charge, with no service name attached.
3. Convert every charge to an annual figure before you judge it. Monthly pricing exists to keep you from doing this multiplication.
4. Apply the re-subscribe test. For each one ask: if this cancelled tonight, would I pay full price to get it back tomorrow? Anything that gets a hesitation is a cancellation. Inertia is not a preference.
5. Enter the survivors above and read the total in working days. That figure — not the monthly amount — is the honest price of the stack.

What to cancel and what to keep

The useful distinction is not cheap versus expensive, it is used versus owned. A $16 service you open four nights a week can easily be better value than a $6 one you opened twice last year. Time-cost thinking is not an argument for owning nothing; it is an argument against paying rent on things you have stopped using.

Two structural moves are worth more than a dozen small cancellations. Rotating subscriptions — keeping one streaming service at a time and switching when you run out of things to watch — typically cuts this category by half or more with almost no felt loss. And switching a service you genuinely keep from monthly to annual billing usually saves 15–20%, which is the one case where the annual commitment works in your favour.

Finally, set a calendar reminder to repeat this audit once a year. Subscription stacks regrow quietly: free trials convert, prices rise mid-contract, and household members add services independently. An hour of attention a year is a good trade for several working days.