The One-Afternoon Subscription Audit (Find $50–$150/Month)

Subscription businesses are built on a simple bet: that you will not look. Charges are small, automatic, and spread across enough cards and app stores that no single statement tells the story. The audit below is the look. It takes one afternoon, requires no service with access to your accounts, and reliably finds money. (Prefer to total as you go? Keep the subscription cost calculator open in another tab.)

Step 1: Collect the evidence (30 minutes)

Statements: pull the last 3 months for every card and checking account. Three months matters: it catches quarterly charges and merchants that bill on odd cycles.
App stores: both iPhone and Android keep a complete list of app subscriptions in settings, including the ones billed through the store you'd never find on a statement description.
Email: search "your subscription", "renewal", and "receipt". This surfaces annual plans months before they bill again.

Write down every repeating merchant, the amount, and the cadence. Divide annual charges by 12 so everything speaks monthly.

Step 2: Three piles, ruthless but fair (30 minutes)

Keep. You used it in the last two weeks, or it has a clear job (insurance, cloud backup). No guilt; subscriptions you use are just spending.
Cancel. The forgotten trial, the service that was for one show, the gym from the ambitious January. If you have to think longer than ten seconds, it's a cancel.
Downgrade or rotate. The interesting pile. Family plans nobody shares, 4K tiers on a 1080p TV, and the streaming rotation trick: keep one service a month instead of five forever. Price-crept services belong here too; that $9.99 that became $14.99 deserves a fresh decision at the new price.

Step 3: Actually cancel (60 minutes, the annoying part)

Work the cancel pile immediately, while irritation is fresh. App-store subscriptions cancel in two taps from the settings list. Direct subscriptions vary from a button to a dark-pattern maze; for the maze, search "[service] cancel" and follow the exact path, and know that in the U.S. many card issuers let you block a recurring merchant if a service refuses to let go. Skip paid cancellation services: several charge their own subscription and ask for broad account access to do what you just did in an hour.

Step 4: Give the money a job (15 minutes)

A canceled $60/month that stays in checking evaporates. Point it somewhere with a name: the savings goal calculator turns it into a funded goal with a date, and the compound interest calculator shows the ten-year version of the decision (spoiler: $60/month at 7% is roughly $10,400 in a decade).

Keeping it audited without the afternoon

The audit decays: new trials start, prices creep, and in a year the fog is back. This is a visibility problem, which is why Stoia's recurring detection watches your transactions for repeating charges, lists them with renewal dates, and flags price increases when they happen. Until launch, a calendar reminder every six months and this checklist do the job manually.