$9.99/Month: 2024 Edition
A money-saving step-by-step guide to assessing your subscriptions and their value.
Two years ago, I wrote one of my favourite articles about the invisible drip of app subscriptions. The article is still absolutely worth a read, but to give you the TL;DR version I discussed:
How I became more aware of the subscriptions I keep and their annual cost ($1,520/year).
The difference between monthly, lifetime purchases, and hybrid subscription models.
The return on investment for purchasing lifetime licenses to applications.
Changes I made to reduce my yearly expenses by over $300/year
Two years after publishing that article, I wanted to give an update on my current subscriptions and my experience pairing down the services I subscribe to, and to encourage you to do the same.
Rationale
It's effortless to commit to subscriptions without seeing the cumulative monthly and yearly impact they can have. Many of the subscriptions I sign up for reoccur monthly, and with each renewing on a different day, their cumulative weight becomes thinly spread out across the month. In that way, they become ambient expenses - $5 here, $10 there - and I can quickly lose sight of how many subscriptions I have and their total cost. This exercise helped me look at the total cost of my subscriptions across a year to help me make more informed choices about the services I want to keep. It's easy to keep a $5/month subscription hanging around, but when you conceptualize it as a $60 expense relative to the dozens of other subscriptions you're maintaining, you begin to see things in a new light.
Step 1: Write Out All Your Subscriptions
Apple makes it easy to view your subscriptions in Settings > Tap on your Account Name at the very top > Subscriptions.
The first step was writing out all the subscriptions I am currently enrolled in. This is easy enough on iOS, as Apple aggregates all active and recently inactive subscriptions in a single settings window. However, as I did this process, I kept finding more subscriptions I made outside the App Store, which helped drive home the point of how easy it is to start a subscription and how difficult it can be to keep tabs on all of them.
After tracking down all my active subscriptions, I converted any monthly costs into their yearly price. Next, I broke down my subscriptions into four categories:
Media: My various currently active streaming services.
Applications: Subscription-based applications across my Apple devices.
Sports: Sports streaming services.
Apple: Apple One and Subscription AppleCare plans.
As of July 09, 2024, my current subscriptions looked like this:
Media
Netflix: $16.49/month ($197.88/year)
Discovery+ (Ad-Free): $8.99/month ($107.88/year)
Disney+ Premium: $14.99/month ($179.88/year)
Subtotal: $40.47/month ($485.64/year)
Applications
Day One: $31.99/year
Flightradar24 (Gold Plan): $45.99/year
Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots: $34.99/year
MoneyWiz: $24.49/year
Parcel: $4.99/year
Office 365 (Personal): $3.14/month ($37.68/year)
1Password: $59/year
Grammarly: $148.94/year
Sketch: $175.34/year
NordVPN: $45.28/year
Subtotal: $50.72/month ($608.69/year)
Sports
MLS Season Pass: $69.00/season
Sportsnet Now: $249.99/year
MLB Season Pass: $99.00/year
Subtotal: $34.75/month ($417.99/year)
Apple
AppleCare+ - MacBook Air M3: $99/year
AppleCare+ - Apple Watch Ultra: $6.49/Month ($77.88/year)
Apple One: $44.95/month ($539.40/year)
Subtotal: $59.69/month ($716.28/year)
Total (Across All Categories): $185.635/month ($2,227.62/year)
Step 2: Process the Pain
If you're anything like me, seeing that number was gut-wrenching. I don't think I had that many subscriptions, yet their combined costs soaring to nearly $200/month was quite sobering. Seeing $2,227 hits a lot different than mentally being aware that you have a few $5/month subscriptions floating about.
Step 3: Easy Outs
Once, I was staring smack dab at all my subscriptions; some stood out as being easy to justify and keep, while others didn't have a place in my life at that moment. So, for this step, I unsubscribed from all the easy-to-cancel subscriptions: things I hadn't used for a while that weren't relevant to me anymore.
The only easy-to-delete subscription on my list is Netflix, which costs $197.88/year. But even removing that lowers my expenses by over $16/month.
Previous Total: $185.635/month ($2,227.62/year)
Unsubscribe from Netflix: $16.49/month ($197.88/year)
New Total: $169.15/month ($2,029.74/year)
Step 4: Better Deals
The fourth step was looking for better rates or deals across the subscriptions I plan to keep. This can be achieved by moving to a yearly rate (which often offers a slight discount, e.g., 12 months for the price of 10) or subscribing to a lower tier or service. But make sure you have a good history of using the service you plan on upgrading to a yearly rate; while you may get a better deal across a year, you'll lose more money if you subscribe yearly but only use the service for 3-4 months.
Here are the changes I made:
Previous Total: $169.15/month ($2,029.74/year)
Discovery+ (Ad-Free): $8.99/month ($107.88/year) downgraded to Discovery+: $5.99/month ($71.88/year)
Disney+ Premium: $14.99/month ($179.88/year) downgraded to Disney+ Standard at Yearly Rate: $9.99/month ($119.99/year)
Flightradar24 (Gold Plan): $45.99/year downgraded to Flightradar24 (Silver Plan): $19.99/year
Office 365 (Personal): $3.14/month ($37.68/year) downgraded to Office 365 (Basic): $1.99/month ($23.88/year)
New Total: $157.84/month ($1,894.05/year)
Making these changes to unsubscribe from one service and modify four other subscriptions has helped lower my expenses by $27.80/month ($333.57/year).
Another option is to shop around for different providers. For example, I could see if a competitor to NordVPN can offer me a better rate as a new customer and commit to them for 1-2 years. Companies often look to secure new customers rather than reward loyalty, so while flip-flopping between providers can be a hassle, it could result in significant savings in the long run.
Finally, Lifetime Subscriptions can be an option if it's an app you adore using, but there's a catch. Lifetime purchase options are often 3-to-5 times the price of a yearly subscription, so you need a long window of use before seeing any return on investment. For example, I purchased a lifetime subscription to the photo editor Darkroom in 2020 for $105, 2.7 times more than the annual cost of $39.99. It's been four years since that purchase, and I still use the application regularly, so the lifetime license was a sensible purchase. Other apps like Flighty have a lifetime option that costs 5.25x their annual cost, so despite buying the app in 2020, it'll still be over a year before I start coming out ahead on that purchase.
Step 5: Cancel Auto-Renewals
Cancel autorenewals on your yearly subscriptions. Subscriptions' hassle-free nature is part of the problem that results in us renewing without friction. By cancelling an app's autorenewal, we introduce a choice point where we can decide whether or not we want a subscription to continue after it lapses. At that point, I can determine whether the service was valuable and fits my lifestyle, if I am happy with the new price, or if I want to switch to a different tier or price point when resubscribing. Often, companies will auto-subscribe you back to the most expensive rate or at an increased rate if prices have gone up with little to no notice. For example, the MLB Season Pass costs $204.29/year, but it usually gets slashed to less than half of its full-season cost by the long weekend in May. I like baseball, but I'm happy to wait 1.5 months into the season to save over $100 bucks.
In my current list, apps such as NordVPN, Grammarly, MLS Season Pass, and MLB all have their autorenewals turned off.
Step 6: Keep What's Valuable
The goal is not to be miserly & reduce subscriptions to the bone but to ensure that what you decide to keep is mission-critical and brings value to you. Some applications, like Parcel, Day One, Sketch, MoneyWiz, and Apple One, offer tremendous value for the cost (although Apple One is getting quite pricy at over $500/year). Other subscriptions, like MLB, NordVPN, and Grammarly, are valuable but optional, and I am more keen to look for deals & alternatives to these services, or I will delay purchasing them again only once I need them.
Step 7: Reassess Often
I like to revisit this process every 12 months to ensure my subscriptions don't spiral out of control. In this process, I select a couple of applications I am ambivalent about and take a few minutes to explore whether they have a new rate, whether I need the subscription anymore, or whether an alternative exists. For example, iOS 18 is releasing a Password application as part of iOS 18. When that time comes, I may review it alongside 1Password, determine how its features meet my needs, and whether the $59/year I spend on 1Password is a value-added expense.
In Sum
By making just one cancellation and tweaking a few services across my subscriptions, I saved nearly $350/year without significantly degrading my quality of life. While writing the entry took a minute, the actual process of listing, categorizing, unsubscribing, and exploring alternatives for apps took 3 to 4 hours tops (valuing my time, that's a conversion rate of $83-111/hour).
It's important to support the creators and developers whose apps and services bring value to our lives. Still, it's equally important to regularly check in and be active curators of our subscriptions. This newly freed $335 can now go towards supporting other developers and content creators, buying 13 more Apple Polishing Clothes, or used to enhance other areas of life.
