How to find every subscription you're paying for

The average person in our data has 11 active recurring charges. When we ask people to guess before they look, the median guess is 6.

That gap is the entire problem. Subscriptions aren't expensive because any one of them is expensive. They're expensive because they're invisible, and invisible things don't get cancelled.

Here's the audit. It takes about forty minutes the first time.

Step 1: Pull twelve months, not three

Most people check the last statement, find two or three obvious things, and stop. This misses everything billed annually, which is where the large amounts hide. A $9 monthly service is annoying. A $140 annual renewal you forgot about in the eleventh month is the one that stings.

Export twelve months from every account you have, including the card you barely use. That card is usually where the forgotten stuff lives, precisely because you barely look at it.

Step 2: Sort by merchant, not by date

This is the trick that makes the rest easy. Chronological statements hide repetition. Grouped by merchant, a subscription is unmistakable: the same name, the same amount, at a regular interval.

Anything that appears three or more times at a consistent amount goes on the list.

Step 3: Sort the list into four buckets

Not everything recurring is waste. Put each one in a bucket before you decide anything.

The Unknown row is the urgent one. An unrecognized recurring charge is either a merchant trading under a different name, a free trial that converted, or fraud. All three deserve an answer this week.

Step 4: Check the tier, not just the subscription

The step almost everyone skips. Of the subscriptions people keep, roughly a third are on a plan larger than they use — a family tier for one person, a storage tier at 12% capacity, a professional plan bought for a project that ended.

Downgrading is less satisfying than cancelling, but in our data it accounts for about 40% of total recovered spend.

Step 5: Set a date and repeat

Subscriptions regenerate. The audit is worthless as a one-off and genuinely powerful twice a year. Put it in the calendar for six months out, right now, before you close this tab.

What people usually find

Across the audits we've seen, the pattern is consistent. Two to three dormant services. One duplicate, usually streaming or cloud storage. One free trial that converted silently, typically nine to fourteen months ago. And one annual renewal nobody remembered agreeing to.

The median recovered amount is $312 a year. The largest we've seen was $2,180, which was a business software licence someone had been paying personally since leaving a job in 2022.