ExitTerms

How to review and audit your subscriptions

List every recurring line from the last few statements, then decide one plan at a time whether to keep it.

By ExitTerms Editorial. .

This is general information, not legal advice. Your plan, billing provider, location, and contract can change what applies to you. Check the provider’s pages and your own account documents before you act.

Use statements, because memory undercounts

An audit is a list of what you actually pay on a repeating schedule. Memory misses annual plans, family plans someone else started, and trials that converted months ago. The statements do not miss a posted charge. Set aside an hour. Pull the last three monthly statements for every card you use, the bank account if anything is drafted from it, and the platform accounts that can bill on their own: Apple, Google Play, a phone carrier, and any TV or game store you have used. If you use a payment wallet or an online balance, open that history too.

You are looking for lines that repeat or that look like a membership: streaming, music, news, cloud storage, software, a gym, a fitness app, a game pass, a box, a professional tool. Mark anything you cannot name. Unknown lines are part of the list, not leftovers. How to read a recurring charge on your statement is the method for a single confusing descriptor.

Make one row per plan

Give every row the same fields. Service name, once you know it. Descriptor as printed. Amount. How often. Last charge date. Next date, if you can see it in the account or can estimate it from the cycle. Which card or account pays. Whether you still want it. Account email. A blank is acceptable. A guess marked as a guess is acceptable. A blank filled in from a hunch, and then treated as fact, will send you to the wrong cancel page.

Sort the list two ways. Sort by amount so a large annual fee is obvious. Sort by date so a cluster of trials that started in the same week is obvious. Then sort by “still want” so the cancel work is a short queue. Do the cancels one at a time. A stack of half-finished chats is hard to prove later. How to cancel a subscription and keep proof is the close-out for each row you end.

Look where recurring bills hide

Annual charges hide from a monthly glance. Search twelve months, not three, before you decide a service is gone. Search for the brand name and also for the descriptor you saw last year. A price increase can make last year’s amount fail as a search key. Search the descriptor’s stable part.

Family and shared plans hide in the payer’s account. One streaming login can be billed to a partner’s card. Ask, and look at that statement with permission. App-store subscriptions hide inside the store’s subscription list, which is a different screen from the app itself. Carrier billing hides on the phone bill, sometimes in a third-party section rather than next to the wireless plan. Platform billing is covered in When another company bills the subscription.

Trials hide because the early statements show a small charge or no charge. The row you want is the one that will grow. Read How free-trial billing works and put the conversion date on the row. Two rows for one brand usually mean two billers or two accounts. Keep both until you know which login each one uses.

Use a service entry when we have one

When the row matches a service we publish, open the entry and read the ways to cancel, the notice, the fee line, and the price table. The review date tells you how fresh that reading is. These are published and can anchor a list: Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, YouTube Premium, Microsoft 365, The New York Times, Audible, Dropbox, Canva, and Xbox Game Pass. The full directory is the services page. If a brand is listed as in progress, we have no entry and we are not telling you how to cancel it.

The entry is background. Your row still needs your amount, your email, and your renewal date. A household can pay a different price from the table because of a promotion, a bundle, a student plan, or a legacy rate. The table explains what the provider listed on the review date. The statement explains what you paid.

Decide, cancel, and check one cycle later

For each row, choose keep, cancel, or identify. “Identify” means you still cannot name the merchant. Use the phone number on the statement, the email search, and only then a call. Do not cancel a plan you cannot name if the amount might be rent, insurance, a toll account, or a utility on a card. Those are recurring and they are not subscriptions in the sense this site covers. When you know it is a subscription you do not want, cancel it in the billing account and write the confirmation into the row.

After one full cycle, check the statements again. A row marked cancelled should have no new charge for a later period. A charge for time that was already underway may still fit the terms. What to check after you cancel is that review. A row marked keep should match the amount you expect. If a promotional price ended, the new amount should match the offer you accepted. Update the row. An audit that is never opened again becomes a stale list. A reminder three months out is enough to catch an annual plan you missed and a trial you have since started.

Share the list with the other payer in the household if you both start subscriptions. Agree who adds a row when they start a trial. The expensive pattern is two people each assuming the other cancelled. The list makes the assumption visible. If you later dispute a charge, the row plus the confirmation is the file the issuer will ask about. The dispute steps are in How to dispute an unwanted charge with your card issuer.

Service entries mentioned here

These entries are the dated records for those providers. Open one for the channels, notice, and fees we recorded from that provider’s pages.

Something on a service entry look wrong? Report a correction. For the full list of entries, see all services.