Showerthought: The one spreadsheet change that saved me $200 a month on subscriptions

I finally looked at my bank statements last month and saw I was paying $15 for a cloud storage service I hadn't opened in 8 months. I canceled it plus two other random SaaS tools I forgot about, and now I check all my recurring charges every 3 months. Anyone else find a sneaky subscription you didn't realize you were still paying for?

3 comments

3 Comments

king.wyatt1mo ago

The "didn't know I signed up for it" happens way too often now with free trials auto-charging us.

adamgreen1mo ago

Yep, I had 3 different streaming services hitting my card for like 14 months before I caught them. I think companies count on the fact that people wont check their statements that carefully. The worst one was some cloud storage thing I signed up for to get a free month of something else. $9.99 a month for 15 months before I noticed. That's like $150 down the drain for something I opened once. I setup an alert on my banking app now for anything over $5 that I dont recognize immediately.

the_piper1mo ago

That "hadn't opened in 8 months" line hit me hard (because same, honestly). I went through my own subscriptions last week and found out I was paying $12 a month for some meditation app I used exactly twice in 2023. I didn't even know I signed up for it, probably downloaded it during a stressful week and forgot to cancel the trial. What really got me was the $8 manga reading app my daughter apparently bought on my phone (she's 7, so now I have to teach her about spending other people's money without asking). I also found a gym membership I literally never use, so now I just do pushups in my living room like a normal person.