Subscription Audit Quiz: Find Hidden Charges

What a subscription audit actually is

A subscription audit is a deliberate review of every recurring charge leaving your accounts. Not a glance at your statement, a list. You write down each service, what it costs, when it renews, and whether you have opened it in the last month. The point is not to cancel everything. It is to make each payment a decision you are still making rather than one you made once and forgot.

The subscription audit checklist

1. Pull three to six months of statements from every bank account, credit card and PayPal account. Recurring charges are easiest to spot across several months, not one.
2. Search your email for renewal, receipt, subscription, trial and welcome. Trials that converted almost always left a receipt.
3. Check your app store. On iPhone: Settings, your name, Subscriptions. On Android: Play Store, profile, Payments and subscriptions.
4. Check PayPal automatic payments and your phone bill. Carrier add-ons never appear on your card statement at all.
5. Sort everything into keep, downgrade or pause, and cancel. Be honest about the last thirty days of use.
6. Cancel the cancel pile the same day, and save every confirmation email.
7. Diarise the next audit for three months' time.

Where subscriptions hide

Four places account for most of what people miss. App store subscriptions, because they show as a single Apple or Google charge that lumps several services together. Annual renewals, because eleven months of silence is long enough to forget. Carrier add-ons, which sit on a phone bill nobody reads line by line. And services billed under a parent company name you would not recognise on a statement. If a charge looks unfamiliar, search the exact billing string before assuming it is fraud.

Keep, downgrade or cancel

Most audits treat this as a binary and lose money because of it. Three buckets works better. Keep the things you used this month. Downgrade the ones you use but not at the tier you are on, since a cheaper plan, a family plan or an annual switch often halves the cost without losing anything. Cancel anything untouched for thirty days. Services you enjoy seasonally belong in a fourth pile: cancel now, resubscribe when you want them, because almost nothing charges to return.

Frequently asked questions