Everyone has a number. It's the number of dollars flowing out of your bank account every month into services you meant to cancel. If you're a normal person, it's between $40 and $120. If you were technical once and signed up for a lot of tools, it's $150-300.
At a real hourly wage of $20, $120 a month is 6 hours of work — the length of a good Saturday afternoon, plus dinner. At $40 an hour, $300 a month is 7.5 hours — a full workday, every month, for nothing.
The good news is this is the easiest kind of money to get back. Nobody will come after you for cancelling. The service is designed to make you forget, not to punish you for remembering. A 20-minute audit, done once a year, is one of the highest-ROI time investments in personal finance.
The 20-minute process
Minute 0–3: Make a list
Open two places:
- iOS Settings → your name → Subscriptions. This shows every App Store subscription, including the ones you subscribed to via an app you've deleted.
- Your primary bank and credit-card statement, last 60 days. Sort by merchant. Scroll for recurring amounts.
Write down every subscription you see with the monthly cost. Don't judge yet. Just list.
Minute 3–10: Categorize
Go through the list and put each one in one of four buckets:
- Keep — I use this weekly, and the price in hours feels fair.
- Downgrade — I use this, but the higher tier is more than I need.
- Share / split — This has a family plan or a friend would split.
- Cancel — I haven't opened this in a month. Or I forgot it existed.
The honest heuristic for Cancel: if you forgot it was charging you, it was not earning its keep.
Minute 10–20: Cancel
Go back to iOS Subscriptions, tap the ones in your Cancel bucket, hit Cancel Subscription. Most will finish immediately. For non-App Store subscriptions (anything billed directly by the merchant — Dropbox, Adobe, a lot of SaaS), go to the service's billing page. Expect some to hide the cancel link behind a chat interface — persist, they have to let you cancel by law in most US states.
Do the Downgrade bucket the same way. A $22.99 Netflix account that's used for one person drops to $7.99. A $15.99 Adobe Creative Cloud full plan drops to a $10.99 Photography plan for a hobbyist. These add up.
The math
The median subscription pile, per our own data and published industry estimates, is $79 a month in services the subscriber can't name without looking. After a good audit, most people cut that to roughly $30. That's a $50/month recurring save.
At $20/hr real: 2.5 hours a month, 30 hours a year. Almost a full work week back.
At $35/hr real: 1.5 hours a month, 18 hours a year. Two extra workdays.
And because subscriptions are a compounding drag — every one you keep is ten more years of that same bleed if nothing changes — the ten-year impact of a single good audit is roughly 300 hours of work at $20/hr. More than a month of your working life, reclaimed for the cost of twenty minutes one Sunday.
The subscriptions that pass the audit
The keepers are usually:
- A single streaming service you actually use weekly.
- A password manager. (Security is cheap insurance; skip at your peril.)
- A backup service, if you have meaningful data.
- A cloud storage plan sized to what you actually store.
The rest is usually flexible. Music, premium subscriptions you thought you'd use, content services for a hobby you've moved past — all good Cancel candidates the first time around.
Making it automatic
The 20-minute audit works once. To keep it working, HourSpend's iOS app tracks each subscription as a recurring expense and shows you, monthly, the total hours they cost. When the line grows past your comfort threshold, you'll notice — and you'll run the audit again, without a calendar reminder, because the number will tell you.
Related: Calculate your real hourly wage first — the audit hits differently when you're using the honest number. And if you want to price any specific subscription: Netflix, Spotify, ChatGPT Plus, Apple Music.