The Subscription Audit I Run Every Three Months

Subscriptions are designed to be forgotten. That's not an accusation, just how the pricing works: a service that costs $12.99 a month is cheap enough to ignore and expensive enough, multiplied by a dozen quiet services, to quietly become one of the largest line items in a budget.

Why a budgeting app doesn't catch this

An app can flag that "Subscriptions" totaled $94 last month. What it can't tell you is whether each of those charges is still worth it, because that's a judgment call, not a math problem. The app sees the transaction. It doesn't see whether you opened the app twice this quarter.

The audit

Every three months, on the first Sunday, I go through the full statement and write down every recurring charge on one page: name, monthly cost, and last date used — not last date billed, last date actually opened or watched or worn.

Anything not used in the last 60 days gets cancelled that day, not "at the end of the trial" or "after this month," because that future date never arrives on its own.

What this caught in the last year

A meditation app I used for eleven days and then never again: $70/year. A cloud storage tier upgraded during a one-time project and never downgraded after: $84/year. A streaming service kept "for one show," which finished six months prior: $156/year. None of these would show up as a problem in a monthly total. Each was individually too small to notice and collectively worth canceling.

Why quarterly, not monthly

Monthly is too often — usage patterns don't change fast enough to justify a full review every four weeks, and the audit itself starts to feel like a chore you skip. Yearly is too rare — a full year of an unused $9.99 subscription is real money before you even notice. Quarterly is the interval where the audit still feels light but nothing survives more than two or three months unused.