Subscription Audit: Find the Leaks
List every recurring charge you can think of, tick the ones you have not used in ninety days, and see what the year actually costs — plus what canceling the priciest few would hand back.
Tick the box for anything you have not used in 90 days.
How to use this calculator
Run the numbers once, write the result where you will see it, and let the free expense tracker do the weekly work: it sorts every entry into needs, wants and savings automatically, so drift from the plan is visible the moment it starts instead of at the end of the month. A calculator sets the target; tracking is what actually gets you there.
Ten minutes that typically find $30 a month
The average household badly underestimates its subscription count — the charges are small, spaced out and designed to be forgotten, so $9 here and $12 there never feel like a budget line until they are summed. List them all in the calculator, including the annual ones divided by twelve, and the monthly total usually lands well above the guess. The annual row is the one to stare at: subscription spending is the rare budget category you can cut by a third in one sitting, with nothing to show for it but money back.
Start from the statement, not from memory
Memory audits find the streaming services and miss the $2.99 cloud tier from 2021. Open your card and bank statement, search for the words that recur: sub, stream, monthly, plus, premium, and the app-store biller names. Every match goes on the list. The calculator’s add-row button exists precisely because the honest list is usually longer than the remembered one — most audits end with at least one charge the lister genuinely could not identify, which is a cancellation with no debate required.
The ninety-day rule
Tick the box for anything untouched in three months: not opened, not watched, not attended. Ninety days is long enough to survive a busy season and short enough to catch the gym membership that died in February. Cancel without ceremony — nearly every modern subscription will happily take you back, and streaming services make resubscribing a two-minute event, which means the downside of canceling is tiny and temporary while the upside is permanent cash. The flagged row in the results is your cancellation shortlist, priced in dollars per year.
Rotate instead of hoarding
The endgame of an audit is not zero subscriptions — it is intentional ones. Households that stay lean run one streaming service at a time and rotate monthly, keep annual plans only for things used weekly, and re-run this audit every quarter as new charges breed. Subscriptions are the only budget category where the vendor does the spending for you; a standing fifteen-minute calendar reminder named with this page’s title is the maintenance that keeps the leaks sealed.
Frequently asked questions
How do I handle annual subscriptions?
Divide by twelve and list them — a $95 annual plan is really $7.92 a month. The annualized view in the results shows what they truly cost, which is usually the number that triggers the cancel decision.
Are free trials a trap?
Only untended ones. Start every trial with a calendar reminder one day before it converts, and the trial works for you instead of the vendor — the calculator helps you catch the ones that already slipped.
What about family-shared plans?
Share them, then audit your share: a family plan split four ways is often the cheapest media line in the whole budget. The calculator does not care who pays — list your actual monthly outlay.