We’ve all done it. You sign up for a free trial, forget to cancel, and three months later you’re still paying for something you’ve never actually used. Or you signed up for something genuinely useful two years ago and haven’t opened it since.
Research suggests the average Brit spends around £786 a year on subscriptions. That’s not small change. That’s a weekend away, three months of groceries, or a decent chunk off a credit card bill.
Let’s fix that.
Step One — Find Out What You’re Actually Paying For
Before you can cancel anything you need to know what you’re signed up to. Here’s how to track them down.
Check Your Bank Statement
Go back three months on your current account and credit card statements and highlight every recurring payment. Look for anything monthly or annual. You’ll probably spot at least one thing that surprises you.
Check Your Email
Search your inbox for words like “subscription”, “renewal”, “billing”, and “receipt”. Most services send a confirmation email when they charge you. This catches the ones that slip through your bank statement scan.
Check Your Phone
On iPhone go to Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. On Android open the Play Store, tap your profile picture, then Payments and Subscriptions. Both will show you everything being billed through your phone. People are often genuinely shocked by this list.
Use a Subscription Tracker
Apps like Emma or Snoop connect to your bank account and automatically identify recurring payments for you. Free to use and genuinely useful.
The Usual Suspects
Once you start looking, these are the subscriptions people most commonly forget about.
Streaming services — Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, ITVX Premium, NOW TV. Most households are paying for at least three of these. Do you actually use all of them? Even dropping one saves around £5 to £10 a month.
Gym memberships — one of the most notorious. If you haven’t been since January, you already know what to do.
Software and apps — Adobe, Spotify, Duolingo Plus, dating apps, cloud storage, antivirus software, VPNs. These add up quickly, especially the annual ones you forget about until the renewal hits.
Amazon Prime — genuinely useful for a lot of people but worth asking whether you’d pay £95 a year for it if you were signing up fresh today.
News and magazine subscriptions — The Times, The Guardian, Economist, and various others. If you’re not reading them regularly they’re dead money.
Food and lifestyle boxes — HelloFresh, Gousto, Graze, beauty boxes. Easy to sign up to and easy to forget.
Breakdown cover and insurance add-ons — sometimes added automatically at renewal without you noticing the price has crept up.
What to Do With the List
Once you’ve got everything written down, go through it honestly and put each one into one of three categories.
Keep — you use it regularly and it’s worth the money.
Cancel — you don’t use it or it’s not worth what you’re paying.
Review — you use it but you’re not sure you’re on the best deal.
For everything in the cancel column, do it today. Don’t put it off. Most services make it easy enough to cancel online and many will offer you a discount to stay when you try to leave. Sometimes it’s worth taking.
For the review column, check whether there’s a cheaper tier available. Spotify and Netflix both have lower cost options. Some services charge less if you pay annually rather than monthly.
A Rough Idea of What You Could Save
Here’s an example of what cutting back looks like in practice.
Cancelling one streaming service saves around £8 a month. Cancelling a gym you don’t use saves around £30 to £50 a month. Switching a news subscription to a free alternative saves around £10 to £20 a month. Removing one forgotten app subscription saves around £5 to £10 a month.
That’s potentially £50 to £90 a month, or £600 to £1,000 a year, from a single afternoon’s work.
Make It a Habit
Do this review every six months. Set a reminder on your phone now for six months time. Subscriptions creep back in and prices go up quietly at renewal. Staying on top of it takes twenty minutes twice a year and is genuinely one of the easiest wins in personal finance.
One More Thing
If you find yourself signing up for free trials in future, do one of two things. Either set a calendar reminder for the day before the trial ends, or use a virtual card with a spending limit through your bank app. Monzo, Starling, and Chase all let you create virtual cards for exactly this kind of thing.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.