Late February is the dreariest stretch of the year in our apartment. The snow on the balcony railing has gone gray, the north-facing living room barely gets any real light, and the holiday spending is still sitting on my credit card statement looking at me. Which is exactly why I've made it subscription clean-out month.
This is our third year doing it. It takes one evening, a pot of tea, and a willingness to be slightly embarrassed by what you find.
Step one: find everything
The hard part isn't canceling. It's finding all the things that are quietly charging you. Here's how we hunt them down:
- Go through three months of statements for every card and account, not just one. Some things bill quarterly and hide.
- Check the app store subscription page on both of our phones. This is where the surprises usually are.
- Search email for words like "renewal," "your plan," "receipt" and "trial."
- Look at yearly charges. A yearly fee is easy to forget because you only see it once.
I write everything on a single sheet of paper, divided into "mine," "Sam's" and "shared." This year the list had 14 things on it. I would have guessed nine.
Step two: sort them honestly
For each subscription, we ask the same three questions:
- Did we use this in the last month?
- If it disappeared tomorrow, would we notice within a week?
- Would we sign up for it again today at this price?
Then everything goes into one of three piles: keep, cancel, or pause.
What we kept
One streaming service we both actually watch, Sam's running app, my cloud storage (I'd lose my mind without photo backups), and a cheap music plan we share. These are things we use every single day or every week.
What we canceled
- A second streaming service we signed up for to watch one show in the fall. The show ended in November. We were still paying in February. ($16/month)
- A meditation app I last opened in October. ($13/month, billed yearly, so I set a reminder to cancel before it renews rather than losing what I'd already paid for)
- A recipe site membership I'd forgotten existed. I make the same ten dinners anyway. ($5/month)
- Extra phone storage Sam was paying for after he'd already cleared out his photos. ($3/month)
What we paused
A cat food delivery Olive is fine with, but we'd been buying the same thing cheaper at the store down the street. Paused, not canceled, so if the price drops we can turn it back on. That one saved about $4 a month.
The total
| Item | Monthly savings |
|---|---|
| Second streaming service | $16 |
| Meditation app | $13 |
| Recipe site | $5 |
| Extra phone storage | $3 |
| Cat food delivery (paused) | $4 |
| Total | $41 |
That's almost $500 a year, mostly for things we weren't using. The meditation app and the recipe site were both mine, which was a humbling realization for someone who writes about budgeting.
What we didn't touch (yet)
Our regular household bills aren't technically subscriptions, but I took a look while I was in the spreadsheet mood. Our internet is $80 a month, which seems high for what we use. I made a note to call our provider this spring once I've done some homework on what new customers are being offered. Rent and insurance stay as they are for now. Those have their own timeline.
Making it stick
A few rules we added after the first year, when half the things we canceled sneaked back in by summer:
- Free trials go on the calendar immediately, with a reminder two days before the end date.
- Any new subscription over $5 gets a 48-hour wait. If I still want it after two days, fine.
- Shared subscriptions get mentioned at our monthly money check-in, so nobody's surprised.
By the end of the evening the tea was gone, the list was crossed out in two colors of pen, and Olive had fallen asleep on the stack of statements. Nothing about February got any brighter. But it did get about $41 a month cheaper, and that will do.
