The Subscription Audit: How a Forgotten $9.99 Charge Could Make You $50,000

How many streaming services are you paying for right now? If you had to write the number down from memory, could you get within five dollars of the actual monthly total? When was the last time you logged into that fitness app that’s been stealthily pulling $9.99 out of your checking account since 2022?

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know exactly how many subscriptions you’ve got going, and when you check the numbers on them, you’re probably paying a lot more than you’d like.

I recently had David Bach on the podcast to talk about his book The Automatic Millionaire, and he made the case that finding small ways to cut your spending, and then investing that savings, will allow you to compound modest amounts of money into serious wealth.

One way to find these savings, Bach recommended, is to review your subscriptions — whether to apps or media — and cancel those you’re not using and really don’t care about.

My conversation with Bach nudged me to perform my own subscription audit; I’ll share the results of mine at the end of the article.

First, I’ll walk you through how to do an audit of your recurring subscriptions, cancel the ones you no longer need, and invest those savings to build your nest egg.

The Subscription Creep Problem

The average American household now juggles between 10 and 15 recurring charges a month. Streaming services. News subscriptions. Fitness and meditation apps. Cloud storage tiers you upgraded to when your phone filled up in 2020.

Consumer surveys suggest the average consumer loses about $204 a year to subscriptions they’ve completely forgotten about, and services that scan bank accounts for recurring charges routinely find between $180 and $400 in annual savings the first time they’re run on a new user.

Why does this happen?

Well, the subscription model is specifically designed to exploit behavioral inertia. Once you’re signed up, the friction of canceling feels greater than the $9.99 a month you’re paying, so you just keep paying. And paying. Some companies take this further with what researchers call “dark patterns.” They make it easy to sign up, but difficult to cancel. They hide the cancellation link or make it hard to see, and when you do decide to cancel, they may require you to call a retention specialist during business hours, chat with a bot, or, in the case of certain gym chains, mail a notarized letter to the home branch. It’s like the Hotel California: you can check in, but you can’t check out.

A lot of companies simply bank on you forgetting you have a subscription with them at all. Which is a safe bet: because each monthly subscription amount seems relatively small, your brain doesn’t register them as a big deal and prioritize remembering that they’re dinging your account in the background.

Yet the aggregate cost, projected over the decades you could have been investing that money instead, is not small at all. In fact, it can be yuge.

What the Compounding Math Actually Looks Like

Say you run an audit this Saturday and manage to cut $100 a month in subscriptions. $100 is a good chunk of change, but it’s not life-changing . . . in the short term.

Now take that $100 and automate a monthly transfer into a broad-market index fund — something like VTI or a standard S&P 500 ETF — averaging a historically reasonable ~7% annual return. Here’s what that turns into roughly over time:

After 10 years of investing $100 a month: $17,309After 20 years of investing $100 a month: $52,096After 30 years investing $100 a month: $121,997

So if you’re in your 30s today and you run this audit tomorrow, over 30 years of regular saving/investing, you’re looking at six figures in retirement money that would have otherwise gone to apps and streaming services you’d practically forgotten about.

If you cut just one $9.99/month subscription, invest that $9.99/month for 40 years, and get a conceivable 10% interest rate, you’d end up with over $50,000.

Small cuts, invested consistently, turn into real money because compounding does the heavy lifting for you.

Ain’t compound interest grand?

How to Run a Subscription Audit

To run an audit of your subscriptions, you’ve got two options: app-assisted or manual.

The App Route

There are several apps on the market that will find and even cancel your recurring subscriptions for you. They make identifying and canceling your subscriptions more convenient, though the convenience will cost you.

Here’s a rundown of them:

Rocket Money. The most popular option. You link your bank and credit card accounts, and it pulls every recurring charge into one list. The free tier shows you what you’re paying for. For each charge you find, ask yourself one question: Did I use this in the last 30 days, and would I actually miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? If the answer is no, cancel it. Their premium tier, which runs $7 to $14 a month on a sliding scale, will actually call and cancel the services on your behalf, which is useful for the deliberately difficult-to-kill subscriptions.

If you don’t want to cancel a subscription outright, they’ve got a bill negotiation feature where they’ll work to reduce a bill for you, but they charge 35-60% of your first year’s savings as a success fee.

Hiatus. Like Rocket Money, Hiatus links to your accounts and scans for recurring charges, and like Rocket Money, it offers a concierge team that will cancel subscriptions and negotiate bills for you. The difference is the fee structure. Hiatus premium runs a flat $9.99 a month and doesn’t take a percentage of what they save you on negotiations — whatever they knock off your cable bill stays in your pocket.

Monarch Money. This is a cleaner, more privacy-focused alternative that picked up a lot of users after Intuit shut down Mint in 2024. It tracks your spending and groups recurring subscriptions into a single category for easy perusal. They don’t offer concierge cancellation services, but with the list of subscriptions, you can easily cancel subscriptions on your own. The privacy you get with Monarch Money will cost you $99 a year.

Copilot Money. A similar service to Monarch is Copilot. It automatically labels your expenses into certain categories so you can easily see your recurring subscriptions. It’s what I’ve been using lately. I check my subscriptions once a month and nuke any I don’t need anymore. It’s ad-free and privacy-first for $96 a year.

The Manual Route

If you don’t like the idea of signing up for another subscription in order to reduce your subscriptions, you can DIY your subscription audit:

Review bank account and credit card statements. Log into your bank and credit card accounts, download six months of transactions as CSV files, and dump them into a spreadsheet. Sort by merchant. The recurring charges cluster together. Search for terms like “subscription,” “monthly,” “Apple.com/Bill,” and “Google.”

Cancel the subscriptions you no longer want.

Review your Apple and Google Play App subscriptions. A lot of recurring subscriptions occur within apps on your phone. You can easily cancel these from your phone.

On iPhone: Settings → your name → SubscriptionsOn Android: Play Store → profile icon → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions

Cancel the ones you no longer want.

Review PayPal recurring payments. There’s a good chance a lot of your recurring payments are happening via PayPal. Fortunately, they make it easy to cancel right from their platform. Log in to PayPal on desktop, click the gear icon, go to Payments, and click Manage automatic payments. You’ll see every merchant pre-approved to pull money from your account, and you can kill any of them with one click. This is often where the oldest forgotten subscriptions are hiding.

The upsides of the manual audit are that it costs nothing, doesn’t give third parties access to your data, and only takes about an hour.

But don’t delude yourself; if you’re not going to have the gumption to do an audit — and then follow through on the annoying work of actually canceling the unwanted subscriptions — pay for an app; it’s better to pay a little money to save a lot of money, than to save nothing and keep paying the inertia tax.

Don’t Forget to Invest It!

If you cancel $100 worth of subscriptions and then spend that same $100 at Bass Pro Shop on Saturday, you haven’t saved anything. You’ve just moved the money from one form of consumption to another.

If you want to get the most out of these savings, you gotta invest it. Bach recommends making your investing automatic, so you don’t even think about it. Set up a monthly transfer, scheduled for the day after payday, that moves whatever you’ve cut from subscriptions straight into an investment account. If you don’t have a retirement account, Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab will all let you open a Roth IRA online in about fifteen minutes. Need to learn more about IRAs? We’ve written about them.

If you’re already maxing your Roth, send it to a taxable brokerage account instead.

Do this consistently for years (along with regular retirement savings), and your 65-year-old self will have a nice little nest egg waiting for him.

My Subscription Audit Results

I used a combination of app-assisted and manual tactics for my subscription audit. I first looked at Copilot and filtered my transactions by “Subscriptions,” so I could see a list of all the transactions from the past year labeled as subscriptions. I found a few website/newspaper subscriptions that I barely used that were costing about $5 per subscription each month. Canceled those.

The big recurring subscription I found in Copilot was SiriusXM. It was $300 a year. Damn! Didn’t even know it was that much. It definitely wasn’t that much when I initially purchased it maybe five years ago. Guess they’ve been raising rates each year. I can’t even remember why we were once using SiriusXM enough to justify signing up once a free trial for it expired, but I do know we’ve hardly used it in the last several years, turning to our smartphones to stream music from Spotify or Pandora. Easy cancel.

The big payday for me came when I manually reviewed my Apple App subscriptions. I’d signed up for several apps’ yearly premium plans to unlock features that, at the time, I felt I needed. Each of these yearly subscription fees ranged from $50 to $100 a year. I used these apps for a few months, but then stopped. Forgot about them. If I hadn’t reviewed my Apple App subscriptions, these would have been automatically renewed for another year.

The other place where I found a lot of unused subscription fees was PayPal. When signing up for a subscription service, I’ll usually use PayPal to check out since it’s easier than pulling my credit card out of my wallet. I found several unused digital subscriptions there and canceled them right on PayPal.

When I tote up all the cancellations, I saved my family $1,323 a year, or about $110 a month. If I put that $110 into my retirement account for the next 22 years until I turn 65, and assume a 7% rate of return, it could turn into about $70K. Hot diggity! That’s a nice chunk of change.

I’m not anti-subscription altogether. I’ve actually gotten less stingy recently in ponying up for them in support of enterprises I genuinely enjoy; I don’t want the outlets I appreciate to die.

But moving forward, I’m going to be relentlessly ruthless about axing those subscriptions that don’t offer me value.

Do your own subscription audit, cut these finance vampires out of your life, and invest those savings.

Your future self will thank you!

For more simple ways to build substantial wealth, listen to our podcast with David Bach: