The subscription audit: 7 questions, 5 minutes, 90 days

A subscription audit is a 90-day read of your statements that answers seven questions: what you actually pay, what changed, and what you can stop. It takes about five minutes once the statements are open, and it usually finds money: the average person guesses $86 a month in subscriptions and pays $219.¹ Most audits miss because they look at 30 days, so the first question is about the window.

1. Pull 90 days, not 30

Open the last three statements for every card and account you pay from, including the debit card and the one card you only use for "a couple things." Search each for recurring merchants. The reason for three months is arithmetic: a quarterly charge appears in one month out of three, and an annual charge appears in one month out of twelve. A 30-day audit has a one-in-three chance of seeing the quarterly one and a one-in-twelve chance of seeing the annual one. Ninety days catches every quarterly charge and a third of the annual ones, and the annual ones you still miss tend to be the same three: the domain, the cloud drive, and the membership that renewed at the price you signed up at two years ago.

Write each recurring charge on one line: merchant, amount, and the date it posts. This list is the audit. Everything else is a question asked of it.

2. What did it cost last year?

Add the lines, with annual charges divided by twelve and quarterly ones by three, and write the monthly total next to what you would have guessed. Most people are off by more than $100. In C+R Research's survey, the ten-second guess averaged $86 and the itemized figure averaged $219, with nearly a quarter of people off by $200 or more.¹ Multiply the monthly total by twelve. That yearly figure is the one that makes the next five questions worth asking.

3. Which ones raised the price?

For each line, find the same merchant on a statement from about six months ago and compare the amount. Streaming, music, cloud, and fitness services raise prices in small steps and announce them in emails most people do not open. A $2 increase sounds like nothing; seven of them is $168 a year, and the increases compound because next year's raise is a percentage of this year's higher price. This question also catches the plan you were quietly moved onto when a "basic" tier was discontinued.

4. Which ones do your cards already cover?

Open the benefits page for each card you hold. Many cards include a monthly or annual credit for a streaming service, a delivery membership, a rideshare app, or a news subscription. If you pay one of those services from a different card, the credit goes unused and you pay the full price. The fix is not to sign up for anything; it is to move an existing subscription onto the card that reimburses it. This is the one audit question that can cut the total without cancelling anything.

5. Which ones did you use this month?

Open each app or service and look at the last activity date. If the last time you used it is older than the last time it charged you, that is the answer, and no further deliberation is needed. Economists who studied what happens when a replaced card forces people to re-enter payment details found that cancellations jump in those months, which means a lot of subscriptions survive only because nobody asked.² This question is you asking.

Two exceptions are worth keeping: anything with data you would need to export first (photos, documents, the password manager), and anything that auto-renews annually within the next few weeks, which you should cancel now rather than after it charges.

6. Cancel in the app, then confirm on the statement

A cancellation is a claim until the next charge fails to post. Cancel inside the app or on the website, screenshot the confirmation, and put a reminder on the next billing date. When that date passes with no charge, the cancellation is real. When a charge posts anyway, you have the screenshot, and how to dispute a charge covers what to do next. For anything you paid annually, check the refund terms before cancelling; some services prorate, most do not, and it may be worth keeping until the term ends.

7. Or let something watch the statement for you

The audit works. Its weakness is that it is a snapshot, and the total drifts back within a year through the same three doors: a new charge, a price increase, and a duplicate. The durable fix is something that reads the statement every day and tells you when a recurring charge changes, which is either a calendar reminder to repeat the audit every quarter or software that does the comparison for you.

Either way, the number to track is not the total. It is the delta: what is new, what went up, what posted twice. How much people spend on subscriptions explains why the total is always wrong, and how much an emergency fund should be shows where the same charges distort a different number.

The five-minute version

1. Open 90 days of statements; list every recurring charge with amount and date.
2. Total it, with annual charges divided by twelve. Write your guess next to it.
3. Compare each charge to six months ago; note the raises.
4. Check card credits; move covered services to the card that covers them.
5. Open each app; cancel anything unused since its last charge, and confirm on the statement.