I Audited Every Subscription I Pay For. Here's What I Cut.

My mid-year money checkup this month included a quick pass over my recurring charges, and it nudged me to sit down for the full version again. So this week I went through every subscription I pay for. No single charge surprised me. I know what I pay for. The number that mattered was the total, and it had climbed since my last audit, one quiet yes at a time, the way a stack of small subscriptions always does.

Small on their own, big together

Subscriptions work because each one is priced to disappear. A few dollars a month never feels worth agonizing over, so you say yes, and the charge settles into the background. The design rewards adding and forgives forgetting, so the total climbs without any single decision that feels like a mistake.

The numbers show how far it runs. A 2021 West Monroe poll found the average person was spending $273 a month on subscriptions, up from $237 in 2018, and 66% underestimated their own total by more than $200. A more recent 2025 YouGov survey for CNET found the average subscriber pays about $17 a month, more than $200 a year, for subscriptions they don't even use. Most of that is money going to things people forgot they signed up for.

My charges were already logged

Because every charge is logged and tagged, no subscription hides from me in the space between statements. What I don't get automatically is the sum. The charges land on different days and file themselves separately, so nothing stacks them into a single number until I go looking. That is what the audit is for. Filtering my transactions down to the recurring ones took about a minute. If you don't track every charge, that gathering is the harder job: a full year of card and bank statements catches the annual subscriptions, which surface only once and carry the biggest price tags, and your app store's subscription screen turns up whatever renews quietly in the background.

One monthly number, one annual number

A raw list still hides the damage, because the charges arrive on different rhythms, some monthly, some annual, one of mine quarterly. So I converted every one to a monthly figure, added them up, and multiplied by twelve.

The annual number is the one that lands. A charge that reads as a harmless few dollars a month becomes real money once you see its yearly weight, and a stack of them can quietly outweigh a bill you actually watch. That yearly figure is what made me stop maintaining the list and start cutting it.

Sort by "would I re-subscribe today"

Seeing the total is one thing. Deciding what belongs in it is another, and that is the part logging never does for me. With the full list and the real numbers in front of me, I stopped judging each charge by its size and ran every one through a single question: if this weren't already charging me, would I sign up for it today at this price?

That question is ruthless, which is the point. A few passed instantly, the tools I use every day and would pay for again without blinking. Others did not. There was the one whose price had climbed while my use of it had dropped, and two streaming apps that overlapped enough that paying for both was hard to justify. I knew what each of them cost me. The audit's job is to make every charge re-earn its place at today's price and today's usage, instead of coasting on the reason I first said yes.

Deciding what to cancel is still my call. All the audit does is make sure nothing gets to skip the question.

Seeing the total in one place

This is where the tool I build earns its place. The reason the total stays invisible for most people is that nothing adds it up for them by default. A bank shows each charge on the day it lands, scattered across the month and never summed. Even when you record every charge like I do, the running total still has to be assembled.

So I log my recurring charges in Trupocket, either by hand or as a Scheduled Transaction that records itself on the same day each month. My subscriptions are scattered across categories, streaming under Entertainment, cloud storage under Software and Services, and the rest spread the same way. So I add a #subscription hashtag to each. That hashtag is what pulls them back together: one view lists every charge carrying it, wherever it lives, and sums them into the single number this whole exercise is chasing. It won't pull the charges from your bank or cancel anything for you, so you enter them, tag them, and decide what stays. What it gives back is that total in one place, so next time subscription creep sets in I don't have to reassemble it by hand.

This is why I keep it on a schedule instead of treating it as a one-time cleanup. I've run this audit before, I cut what failed the question, and I already know a few new subscriptions will pile up before the year is out. That's how they're built. So it goes back on my calendar every few months. The charges are always easy to see. Adding up the total and asking whether each piece still earns its place is the real work, the kind that doesn't stay done.

If you have never run this on your own subscriptions, the first total is the one that pays for itself. You can get it with nothing more than a list and last month's statement. A tool like Trupocket mainly saves you the rebuild, so the number is waiting for you next time instead of a blank page. Getting that first number is the hard part. Keeping it current is upkeep.