A friend of mine discovered she’d been paying $14.99 a month for a meditation app she used exactly twice — in 2024. That’s almost $360 thrown away on good intentions and a forgotten password.
She’s not alone. Studies suggest the average American spends around $273 per month on subscriptions, and most people underestimate their actual total by $100 or more. We sign up for free trials, forget to cancel, and the charges just blend into the background noise of our bank statements.
Here are five categories where money tends to disappear.
Streaming Services You Don’t Watch
This is the obvious one, but it’s worth saying: how many streaming services are you actually using this week? Not this month. This week.
Most households have between 3 and 5 active streaming subscriptions. At $15 each, that’s $45-75 a month. The trick isn’t canceling everything — it’s rotating. Watch what you want on Netflix for two months, cancel, switch to Hulu, repeat. You can always resubscribe. They’ll take you back. They always take you back.
Cloud Storage You’ve Already Replaced
Got iCloud, Google One, AND Dropbox? Pick one. If you’re paying for extra iCloud storage because your phone kept nagging you AND you have Google One because of old Android photos — consolidate. You probably only need one paid plan.
Fitness Apps Collecting Dust
The fitness app market is brutal. Peloton, Apple Fitness+, Strava Premium, MyFitnessPal, Noom… chances are you signed up for at least one of these during a New Year’s resolution that lasted about as long as a snowflake in July.
Check your subscriptions. If you haven’t opened it in 30 days, cancel it. You can always restart if you actually need it.
Premium Versions of Free Tools
This one’s sneaky. Lots of apps offer a free tier that does 90% of what you need, but somehow you ended up on the premium plan. Think Canva Pro, Grammarly Premium, or weather apps with paid tiers. Ask yourself: am I actually using the premium features? If you can’t name three premium features you used this month, you probably don’t need them.
Old Software Subscriptions
Adobe Creative Cloud is $55 a month. Microsoft 365 is $7-10. Antivirus software is $5-15. These are the kind of charges that feel “necessary” but might not be. If you used Photoshop once in the last six months, maybe you’d be fine with the free version of Photopea instead. If your computer came with Windows Defender, you probably don’t need a separate antivirus.
How to Actually Find Everything
Here’s the fastest way: open your bank or credit card statement and search for recurring charges. Or use your phone — on iPhone go to Settings → your name → Subscriptions. On Android, open Google Play → Payments & subscriptions. You’ll probably find at least one thing you forgot about.
I did this exercise last month and found $47 in monthly charges I wasn’t using. That’s $564 a year. Not life-changing money, but not nothing either.