What a subscription audit is and when to use it
The average household or freelancer accumulates subscriptions faster than they cancel them — streaming services, software tools, memberships, and apps that seemed worthwhile when added but quietly keep charging long after use drops off. A subscription audit turns that vague sense of "I'm probably overpaying" into concrete numbers: what you're spending now, what price increases will cost you over the next year if you do nothing, and how much cancelling your least-used subscriptions would actually save.
Use this calculator when you want to set a concrete monthly savings target before going through your bank or credit card statement subscription by subscription. Enter your current subscription count and their average monthly cost, estimate what share you'd realistically cancel, and the calculator shows the potential savings alongside your new, trimmed monthly spend — useful for comparing against a savings goal.
The formula
Monthly Spend = Subscription Count × Average Monthly Cost
Savings Potential = Monthly Spend × (Cancel Rate ÷ 100)
Annual Spend = Monthly Spend × 12 × (1 + Annual Price Increase ÷ 100) — this projects a year of spending assuming prices rise once during the year by the entered percentage.
New Monthly Spend = Monthly Spend − Savings Potential
Worked example
Using the calculator's own defaults: 11 subscriptions averaging $16/month, a 20% cancel rate, and a 5% expected annual price increase.
- Monthly Spend = 11 × $16 = $176.00
- Savings Potential = $176.00 × 0.20 = $35.20
- Annual Spend = $176.00 × 12 × 1.05 = $2,112.00 × 1.05 = $2,217.60
- New Monthly Spend = $176.00 − $35.20 = $140.80
These figures match the calculator's displayed results for those inputs.
Common mistakes / how to interpret
- Guessing at the cancel rate instead of counting. Go through your actual statement and count how many subscriptions you'd genuinely cancel before entering a cancel rate — a number pulled from thin air undermines the whole estimate.
- Ignoring the annual increase on subscriptions you keep. Even subscriptions you don't cancel typically get price increases over time; the annual spend figure accounts for this on your current lineup, but a new round of increases next year isn't reflected until you re-run the calculator.
- Treating "percent used" the same as "worth keeping." Percent Used and Cancel Rate are separate inputs on purpose — a rarely used subscription might still be worth keeping (an annual event pass, for example), so use usage as a signal to investigate, not an automatic cancellation rule.
- Forgetting shared or family plans. If a subscription is split among several people, only your share of the monthly cost should go into the average — otherwise the audit overstates your true spend.