I Audited All My Subscription Costs

The credit card statement was a wake-up call

Checking my June statement, something felt off. The balance was lower than expected. Scrolled through the items -- 13 auto-payments. I thought it was maybe 3 or 4. Thirteen.

So I opened a spreadsheet and listed every subscription, converted to monthly amounts.

The full list of what I was paying for

• Netflix: $10
• YouTube Premium: $11
• Spotify: $8
• ChatGPT Plus: $20
• Cursor Pro: $20
• Naver Plus Membership (Korea's Amazon Prime equivalent): $3.60
• iCloud 200GB: $2.90
• Notion Plus: $8.50 (annual plan, monthly equivalent)
• GitHub Copilot: $10 (annual plan, monthly equivalent)
• Adobe Creative Cloud Photography: $9.80
• Two carrier add-on services: $4.90
• Gym membership: $48

Total: about $156.80/month. That's roughly $1,882 per year going to subscriptions.

How many am I actually using

While listing, I checked how many times I used each service in the past month.

Daily: YouTube Premium, ChatGPT Plus, Cursor Pro. These three earn their keep.

2-3 times per week: Netflix, Spotify. Also fine.

Once or twice a month: Notion Plus, iCloud. Debatable whether the paid tier is worth it.

Barely used: Adobe, GitHub Copilot (replaced by Cursor), carrier add-ons, Naver Plus Membership. I was literally throwing money away.

The gym... I went twice last month. That's $24 per visit.

The purge

Cancelled immediately: GitHub Copilot (overlaps with Cursor), two carrier add-on services, Adobe (I use it maybe 3 times a year -- can just pay monthly when needed).

Debated but kept: Naver Plus Membership (free shipping savings sometimes exceed the cost), Notion Plus (downgrading to free means file upload limits).

Didn't cancel the gym. If I cancel, I'll definitely never go. Set a rule: if I can't manage 3 times a week within 3 months, then I cancel. (I know this is exactly how gym business models work, and yet here I am.)

Savings after the purge

Cancelled subscriptions: about $45/month. Annually, roughly $540. That money was silently draining for a year with zero return.

Honestly felt a bit sick about it. $540 is a domestic trip. Or invested at 7% annual return, about $1,062 in 10 years.

How to avoid the subscription trap

What I realized is that subscriptions are designed to make signing up easy and canceling annoying. Signing up is one button. Canceling requires navigating three menus and answering "are you sure?" twice.

Going forward, whenever I start a new subscription, I'm setting a calendar reminder for "free trial end date." And I'll audit my subscription list quarterly.

Whether I'll actually remember to do this in three months, I honestly doubt. That's why I'm writing this. At least if the record exists, maybe future me will think "oh right, time to check."