How to Audit Your Subscriptions in an Hour (Step by Step)

Nobody knows their own list. That is the real problem with subscriptions, and it is not an accident: each one was added on a different day for a perfectly good reason, none of them is ever looked at beside the others, and the companies collecting the money would much rather it stayed that way, because a charge nobody reviews is a charge that renews forever. An audit is the review. It takes about an hour the first time. It ends with a few cancellations and one honest surprise, and with a tracker in place the next one is short. This page is the procedure; the subscription cost calculator is where the list gets added up.

Where the list actually lives

Memory is useless here. The list has to come from records, and three places catch nearly everything.

Start with the Apple subscriptions page, which is the one most people have never opened and also the one holding every app renewal they have ever agreed to, active and expired, each with its price and its next renewal date printed beside it. On the iPhone: Settings, your name at the top, then Subscriptions. Open it before you do anything else.

Then any other store or payment service holding your card. Another app store, a games platform, a payment service you signed in with once and forgot. Each keeps its own subscriptions page. Check every one you have used in the last year.

Then two full months of bank and card statements, read line by line. Two, not one. Some charges bill on the 29th, 30th or 31st and skip a short month, some bill every other month, and a single month of statements will show you neither, which is why the second month is not optional and why an audit built on one statement tends to miss precisely the charges that have been running longest. Annual charges will not turn up in two months at all, so search your email for receipt, renewal and invoice across the last twelve.

Write each one down with its name, price and billing period. Decide nothing yet.

Turn every line into a yearly figure

Monthly prices multiply by 12, weekly prices by 52, yearly prices stay as they are. The calculator does it if you would rather type than multiply, and the yearly cost of monthly subscriptions has a reference table for the common prices.

Work in yearly figures, because that is what makes the lines comparable with each other and with everything else money goes on, given that nothing else in a household is quoted per month and a subscription quoted only that way never has to stand next to the rent, the insurance or a holiday. $4.99 a month and $12 a week look like roughly the same thing on a sign-up page. At $59.88 and $624 a year they are not.

Add the column up and write the total at the bottom. That total is what the audit is about. Read it twice.

Two questions per line

When did I last use this? Not "do I use it", which invites a generous answer, but a date. More than a month ago for a monthly service is a signal. No idea at all is a louder one.

Would I sign up again today, at this price? Picture the sign-up page with the yearly figure on it rather than the monthly one. If the honest answer is no, then the only thing keeping that subscription alive is the small amount of effort it takes to cancel it, which is precisely the thing the pricing was designed around and the reason the renewal email is so easy to ignore.

Both have to pass. Sort the list as you go:

• Keep: used recently and you would sign up again. Nothing more to think about.
• Downgrade or change: used, but a cheaper tier, a yearly plan or a shared family plan would do the same job. Note the alternative price.
• Cancel: fails either question.

A fourth group tends to appear on its own, which is duplicates. Two cloud storage plans, two music services, a streaming service already inside a bundle you pay for. All but one are cancellations.

Rarely used is its own trap, so turn it into a price per use. A $15.49 service watched twice a month is about $7.75 an evening. The same service watched twice a year is $93 an evening. Whether either is worth it is your call, but the per-use figure makes it a comparison instead of a feeling.

Cancel with the company, not the bank

Cancelling ends the agreement. Blocking a payment only stops the transfer, and a company can treat a blocked payment as an unpaid bill and pursue it. So the order is fixed. Cancel with the company, keep the confirmation email, and involve the bank only if charges continue after a cancellation you can prove. The CFPB's guidance on stopping automatic payments, linked in the sources, covers what a bank can and cannot do.

Anything billed through Apple cancels on the same Subscriptions page you started from. Tap the subscription, tap Cancel Subscription, and it runs to the end of the period already paid for. Apple's support page has the same steps for other devices. For services billed direct, the cancel option is usually buried somewhere under account or billing settings on their website, and if it can only be done by phone, do it during the audit rather than adding it to a list. That is the gym that will not answer the phone, and it will not answer next month either.

Do the whole cancel group in one sitting. Spread it over a week and three of them survive to the next audit.

Name where the money goes before you finish

An audit that frees $40 a month and does not say where the money goes has freed nothing at all, because the amount is absorbed into ordinary spending inside about three weeks and the hour you spent finding it disappears along with it. Pick one now:

• Move the yearly figure into a savings goal; the savings goal calculator shows how much sooner the goal lands.
• Raise the allowance on a budget category that is regularly over, so the audit fixes a real pressure point.
• Nothing, deliberately, because the point was to stop paying for things you do not use. That is legitimate as long as it is a decision.

Write the figure down either way. "The audit saved $612 a year" is a sentence worth being able to say.

What the first audit usually turns up

The pattern is consistent enough to be worth knowing in advance, mostly so that the findings feel expected rather than embarrassing.

There will be one or two forgotten renewals, typically a trial that converted or something signed up to for a single trip or project, and those are the easiest cancellations of the lot, since nobody has to be argued out of a service they had already forgotten they were paying for. There will be a duplicate: two cloud plans, or a music service sitting alongside a bundle that already includes one. Nobody chose to pay twice. The second one arrived with a phone or a family plan and never announced itself.

There will also be one expensive line that is genuinely used — a gym, a meal kit, a professional tool — which dominates the total, passes both questions comfortably, and would have been cancelled by any audit run on price alone rather than on use. The audit's job is not to kill it. It is to confirm that the largest line is a deliberate one.

And most of the small lines will pass. That is fine. Freeing one to three subscriptions and confirming the rest is a normal first result, and the point was never to reach zero.

Afterwards

The audit deals with what you already have. Keeping the list short is about the ones not added yet, and two habits do nearly all of that work.

Log renewals as they happen. Give subscriptions their own tag in Cash Book so that every renewal files under it and the tag total each month becomes the yearly-figure step of this audit done for you, month after month, without anyone sitting down to do arithmetic on a Sunday. Renewals paid through Apple Pay can log themselves once the Shortcuts automation is set up; everything else is one sentence to the mic. How to track subscriptions and recurring bills has the full setup, including catching the annual ones before they bill. Cash Book never connects to a bank and cannot cancel anything on your behalf, so the statement sweep in the first section still has to happen at least once.

Then read the yearly figure before subscribing. Multiply the monthly price by 12 and ask the second question from the test before tapping subscribe. Ten seconds.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.