No one signs up for eleven subscriptions on purpose. They arrive one at a time: a free trial that converts, a service you needed for one month, an annual renewal you forgot was coming. Each is small enough to ignore, which is exactly why the total slips past you.
TL;DR — List every plan in the subscription cost calculator, whatever its billing cycle, to see your real monthly and yearly total and rank your biggest drains. The list saves on your own device.
Put every plan on the same footing
The reason subscriptions are hard to add up is that they bill on different schedules. One is weekly, another monthly, a third renews once a year. To total them, convert each to a monthly figure first:
- Weekly: cost × 52 ÷ 12
- Monthly: the cost as it is
- Quarterly: cost ÷ 3
- Yearly: cost ÷ 12
A $99 yearly plan is $8.25 a month. A $12 weekly habit is $52 a month, far more than it feels. Once every plan is monthly, you can add them and, just as usefully, rank them. The calculator does this conversion for every row so you do not have to.
Read the yearly number, not just the monthly one
The monthly total is easy to weigh against your budget, but the yearly total is where the decision usually gets made. A $15 plan is $180 a year. Three of them is $540. Seeing that figure in one place is often what finally prompts a cancellation, because a year of a service you barely open is a much clearer waste than a small monthly line.
This is why the tool shows both, and why the category breakdown matters. If a third of your spend is streaming across four apps, that is a pattern worth acting on, not four separate small charges.
Turn the audit into a cut
A list on its own changes nothing. Once you can see the total, work down the biggest-drains view and ask three questions of each plan:
- Have I used it in the last month? If not, it is a candidate to cancel today.
- Is there a cheaper tier that still covers what I need? Downgrading is often easier than cancelling and keeps most of the saving.
- Could an annual plan cost less than my monthly one? For a service you are sure you will keep, the yearly price is frequently lower.
Whatever you free up is worth pointing somewhere deliberate rather than letting it drift back into new subscriptions. Send it to a goal with the savings goal calculator, or fold the change into the bigger picture with the net worth calculator. Nothing you enter here leaves your browser, so the audit is yours alone.
