Subscriptions: how to find every one you forgot about, and cancel the ones you do not need

Why subscriptions are invisible

An ordinary purchase you make yourself: you take out the card, pay, see the amount. A subscription charges without you. You make no decision — so you do not notice. On top of that the amounts are small and the dates differ: one on the fifth, another on the twelfth, a third on the twenty-eighth. None of them looks like a problem, and nowhere do they stand side by side so they could be added up.

Add to that the free trials that automatically become paid, the yearly subscriptions charged once a year and forgotten within a month, and the services that changed their name or charge through an intermediary — and it turns out that even an attentive person cannot name all their subscriptions from memory. That is not untidiness; that is how it is built.

The only way to see them is to go looking deliberately. It takes half an hour, and below is exactly where to look so as not to miss any.

Where to look

1. 1The card statement for three months. Not one — yearly and two-monthly charges do not show up in a single month. Look for identical amounts that repeat on roughly the same days. Each such pair is a subscription. Do not forget every card, including the one you “hardly use”.
2. 2The app store on your phone. Both Google Play and the App Store have a separate “Subscriptions” section listing everything you signed up for through them, with the date of the next charge. Many subscriptions live only there, and in the statement they all look the same — just “Google” or “Apple”.
3. 3The bank’s app — the section for automatic or recurring payments. Mobile, internet, insurance may be sitting there, set up once and forgotten.
4. 4Email. Search for messages with the words “your payment”, “receipt”, “subscription renewed”, “your trial is ending”. It is the fastest way to find services that charge through an intermediary and cannot be recognised in the statement.
5. 5Foreign cards, PayPal, payment services. If you ever paid for something through them, something may still be charging there. Log in and look at the history.
6. 6Write everything out in one list: name, amount, how often, when the next charge is, which card. Add it up. That figure is usually the most useful result of the whole check.

Three questions for each one

• Did you use it in the last month? Not “is it useful”, not “might it come in handy”, but did you open it. If not — that is the first candidate. A subscription not used for a month will very likely not be needed next month either.
• Is there a free or cheaper replacement? The photo cloud you pay for may have a free allowance that is enough if you delete the old stuff. Two music services is definitely one more than needed. A family plan for two is often cheaper than two separate ones.
• Yearly is cheaper than monthly — but what are you agreeing to? A yearly subscription is almost always the better deal if you will definitely use it all year. If you are not sure, monthly costs more but can be cancelled next month, and that has a value too.

What to cancel first

Duplicates. Two music services, two clouds, two fitness apps, two paid weather apps. These are the easiest decisions: keep one, the one you use more often, and cancel the other today. There is nothing to think about here.

Subscriptions “just in case”. A reading service you will use on holiday; an online course you will come back to “when there is time”; the premium version of an app you need one feature of once a year. All of it can be signed up for again in a minute when it is genuinely needed — and until then it is paid for every month.

Free trials that became paid. You signed up for a free week, forgot to cancel, and the service has been charging for six months. There are usually one or two of these, and they are the most annoying to find. A good habit for the future is to cancel a trial subscription right after signing up: most services let you use it until the end of the period even after cancelling.

How to cancel and not be charged again

1. 1Cancel where you signed up. A subscription through the App Store is cancelled in the App Store, through Google Play — in Google Play, on a website — on the website. Deleting the app from the phone does not cancel the subscription, and that is the most common mistake: the app is gone, the charges are not.
2. 2Look at the date of the next charge and cancel before it. Many services charge for the next period a day or two before it starts, and cancelling “on the day of the charge” is sometimes already too late.
3. 3Wait for the confirmation email. A cancellation without an email may not have gone through: the page froze, you tapped “keep subscription” instead of “cancel”, the service offered a discount and you accidentally agreed. The email saying “subscription cancelled” is the only proof.
4. 4Check the next statement. A month later look at whether anything you cancelled was charged anyway. If it was — write to support with that same cancellation email; they almost always refund.
5. 5If the service will not let you cancel the simple way — block the charge at the bank. It is a last resort, but it works, and the bank usually does it on a single request.

How not to lose sight of them again

Set up one category in your records called “Subscriptions” and put everything that charges automatically into it. Then the month’s total shows at once what “I bought nothing” costs, and a new subscription that has appeared is noticed straight away, not six months later.

If you have several cards, choose one for all subscriptions. Then next time you will have to look for them in one statement rather than three, and when the card expires you will have to replace it in one place. Some people set up a separate virtual card with a small limit for this: a charge that does not fit within the limit simply does not go through, and the service reminds you of itself by email.

Set a reminder for the day before each charge — at least for the yearly ones, which are the easiest to forget. A reminder the day before gives you time to decide whether another year is needed, instead of finding out about the charge after the fact. In FinLad recurring payments are found on their own from the repeating history, shown apart from the rest of the spending, and remind you of the next charge in advance; that feature is part of the Plus plan.

Example: half an hour that got a thousand a month back

Serhii was sure he had three subscriptions: music, films and a cloud. The statement for three months showed seven identical repeating amounts. The app store added two more that could not be seen separately in the statement, because both were charged as “Google”. Email found the tenth — a yearly subscription to a reading service, taken out last summer on holiday and not used once since.

Altogether it came to one thousand four hundred a month, with the yearly ones spread over twelve. On the three questions from the section above, the following fell away: the second cloud (a duplicate), the fitness app (not opened for two months), the reading service (a trial that became paid), and the premium weather app he needed one feature of once a year. A family music plan for two turned out cheaper than the two separate ones he and his wife had been paying for in turn.

He cancelled where he had signed up, waited for four emails, set up a “Subscriptions” category in the app and moved the rest onto one card. A month later the statement showed five charges instead of ten, and the “Subscriptions” category showed four hundred and fifty instead of one thousand four hundred. The next check he put in the calendar for February.

Family subscriptions

One family plan for everyone is almost always cheaper than separate subscriptions, and here it is simple: sign up for one, add everyone, cancel the rest. What is harder is how to count it: one person pays, everyone uses it, and in the payer’s records the subscription looks like their personal expense.

The workable option is to record it under shared expenses, like the utilities: it is the family’s expense, not one person’s, and it is split the same way as everything shared. If the records are kept separately, agree who pays for what, and do not send each other money for every subscription individually: over a year that is dozens of small transfers nobody remembers. Once every six months, during that same check, compare the list and swap if need be.

And check family subscriptions together. The one who pays does not know whether the other uses it, and the other does not know it is being paid for. Half an hour every six months for the two of you — and the list gets shorter than it seemed to either of you alone.