Subscriptions are designed to be easy to sign up for and easy to forget. A €9.99 per month here, a €4.99 per month there: individually they seem trivial. But when you finally add them all up, the total is often genuinely surprising. Learning how to track your monthly subscriptions is one of the most straightforward ways to find money you did not know you were spending.
Why subscription creep is a real problem
In 2024, the average person in Europe was paying for seven to ten subscription services. Many of those were signed up for during a free trial that quietly converted to paid. Others were shared services that everyone stopped using but nobody cancelled. Some are annual payments that feel invisible most of the year until they hit the account unexpectedly.
The problem is not any individual subscription: it is that they accumulate without a review process. Unlike a one-off purchase, a subscription requires a decision to cancel rather than a decision to buy. The default is to keep paying, and services count on that inertia.
Step 1: Find every subscription you pay for
The first task is building a complete list. Go through each of these sources:
- Bank statements: look at the last three months and note every recurring charge, especially anything with a regular amount appearing on the same date each month
- Credit card statements: repeat the same check on any cards you use
- Email inbox: search for "receipt", "invoice", "subscription", and "renewal" to surface billing confirmations you may have ignored
- App store: check your Apple App Store or Google Play subscriptions list, where any in-app subscriptions are listed with their cost and renewal date
- PayPal or other payment accounts: log in and check the automatic payments or pre-approved payments list
Write down every subscription you find. Include the name, the cost, whether it bills monthly or annually, and the renewal date if you can find it.
Step 2: Convert everything to a monthly cost
Annual subscriptions are easy to underestimate because you only see the charge once a year. To compare everything fairly, convert all costs to a monthly equivalent. Divide any annual cost by 12.
For example: an annual subscription at €79.99 per year works out to €6.67 per month. A software subscription at €119 per year is €9.92 per month. These feel different when you see the annual invoice, but both are real monthly costs that belong in your budget.
Once you have a monthly equivalent for every subscription, add them all up. This is your actual monthly subscription spend. Most people are surprised by the total.
Step 3: Sort them into three groups
Go through your list and put each subscription into one of three groups:
- Keep: you use it regularly and it is worth the price
- Cancel: you barely use it, you forgot you had it, or a cheaper alternative does the same job
- Review: you use it, but you are not sure the price is justified, or you could switch to a free tier
Be honest in the "keep" category. A streaming service you watch once every two months is probably a candidate for cancellation or rotation. Rotating subscriptions, subscribing for one or two months when you want to use a service and then cancelling until the next time, is a practical way to keep access without the constant cost.
Step 4: Cancel, downgrade, or pause what you do not need
For each item in the cancel and review groups, take action immediately. Cancelling a subscription usually takes less than five minutes, but people put it off for weeks because it does not feel urgent. Do it now, while your list is in front of you.
For review items, consider whether a free tier covers your actual usage, whether you can share a family plan with someone, or whether a competitor offers a better price for what you need. Small switches here add up over a year.
If you are hesitant to cancel something, check whether a pause option is available. Several streaming and software services allow a one to three month pause, which lets you avoid the charge without losing your account history or settings.
Step 5: Set up a system to track going forward
Finding and auditing subscriptions is a one-time job. Keeping them under control requires a lightweight ongoing system. The two most important habits are:
- Add every new subscription to your tracker the day you sign up. Include the price, billing date, and a note about when the free trial ends if there is one. Most people forget to cancel trials because they did not write down when the charge would start.
- Review your list every three months. Circumstances change: you might have stopped using something since the last review, or a service might have raised its price without much notice.
If you use MyBalancr to track your bills, you can add every subscription as a recurring bill in the wants category. The dashboard shows your total subscription spend, which bills are coming up this month, and which have been paid. That visibility is usually enough to keep subscription creep from coming back. You can also link to the post on building a monthly budget from scratch to see how subscriptions fit into the bigger picture of your monthly spending.
How much can you realistically save?
The amount varies widely, but running this audit for the first time typically reveals €20 to €80 per month in subscriptions that can be cancelled or reduced without any meaningful impact on daily life. On an annual basis, that is €240 to €960 that was quietly leaving your account without much to show for it.
Even after the initial audit, the quarterly review habit often catches one or two new subscriptions per cycle that have crept back in or are no longer pulling their weight. Small amounts, but completely recoverable with almost no effort.
Keep it simple going forward
The audit is the hard part. After that, the system just needs a couple of minutes per month to maintain. MyBalancr makes this easy: add your subscriptions as bills, mark them paid when they charge, and see at a glance what your total subscription cost is each month.
Start for free and add your first subscriptions in a few minutes. Once they are in the system, you will never wonder where that money went again.