A client came to me with 14 software subscriptions and a vague feeling that something was off. She was paying for things she couldn't fully name. Some of them she'd inherited when she bought the business three years ago. A few she'd signed up for after a recommendation and never fully set up.

We spent 90 minutes going through every line. By the end, we had cancelled seven of them.

The savings: $2,900 a year. Not by switching to cheaper alternatives. By stopping payment for tools nobody was using.

How to actually do this

This isn't complicated. It's boring. That's why nobody does it.

Start with your bank or credit card statement from the last 12 months. Filter for every recurring charge. Make a list. Include the amount, the billing cycle, and which email address it's tied to.

For every item on the list, answer three questions:

Who uses this, specifically? Not "the team" — a name. If nobody can name a person who opens this tool in a typical week, that's a flag.

What does it do that nothing else on the list does? You will find duplicates. Project management tools and task lists are the most common overlap. File storage is another. Scheduling apps, often three of them.

When was it last used? Many tools have usage dashboards. If they don't, ask the person who's supposed to be using it. "When did you last log in?" is a question that produces uncomfortable silences.

What we found in the actual audit

She had three tools that all sent email marketing. One was the "main" one, one was left over from a campaign she'd run in 2022, and one had been set up by a contractor who no longer worked there. Only one was being used. The other two were billing automatically.

She had two project management tools. Her team used one. She used the other for her own task list. When I asked why she hadn't just used the same one as the team, she said she'd never thought about it.

She had a scheduling tool for booking client calls, and she also had the scheduling feature turned on in her email software, which she also paid for. Two scheduling systems, two sets of calendar connections, two things to keep in sync.

None of this was unusual. It's what subscription rot looks like up close: not dramatic, just quiet accumulation over time.

The part that actually costs money

The money isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is what the money was doing.

Seven cancelled subscriptions. Most of them had been autopaying since before she could clearly remember signing up. Some of them she'd been meaning to cancel for months. The friction of cancellation — finding the settings page, clicking through the retention flow, remembering the password — kept it on the to-do list indefinitely.

That friction is the business model. These tools count on you not cancelling. The best defence is a scheduled audit, once a year, looking at every line.

It takes an afternoon. It almost always finds something.

If you'd like someone else to do this: the subscription cleanup is part of the free audit I offer. One call, written report, yours to keep. [Start here.](/contact)