I Tried Tracking Every Subscription I Pay for in a Month

A few weeks ago, I noticed a small charge on my card that I couldn't immediately recognize.

It wasn't a suspicious transaction. It was just a subscription I'd signed up for months ago and almost completely forgotten about.

That made me curious: how many things am I actually paying for every month?

I thought the answer would be maybe five or six.

It was more than that.

The obvious subscriptions were easy

I started with the ones I actually use regularly.

Spotify was easy. I listen to music almost every day, so that one wasn't exactly hiding from me. Netflix was another obvious one. Then there was cloud storage, because apparently years of photos, screenshots and random files have finally caught up with me.

I also had a couple of work-related tools.

None of these felt particularly expensive on their own. That's probably why I had never bothered adding them together.

A typical month looked something like this:

• Music: around S$12
• Streaming: around S$20
• Cloud storage: a few dollars
• Work and productivity tools: around S$20–30
• One paid app: under S$10

Already, I was somewhere around S$60–70 a month.

Not terrible. But I wasn't finished.

Then I found the subscriptions I barely remembered

This was the more interesting part.

There was a small app subscription I had started because I needed one particular feature. I probably used it three times.

There was also an online tool I had subscribed to for a project that ended months ago.

Together, these weren't costing me hundreds of dollars. They were costing me something closer to S$15–20 a month.

And honestly, that's what made them so easy to ignore.

S$6.99 doesn't feel important when you see it on a bank statement. Neither does S$9.99.

But two forgotten subscriptions at roughly S$17 a month work out to more than S$200 over a year.

That was enough for me to cancel them immediately.

I also realised I was counting some things incorrectly

While doing this, I started putting every recurring or repeated digital expense into the same spreadsheet.

Then I realised that wasn't really accurate.

A subscription is usually predictable: you pay a fixed amount every month or year.

Other online services don't necessarily work that way.

Payment services may charge transaction or currency-conversion fees. Marketplaces can take commissions. Financial services may charge depending on what you actually do rather than simply charging you for having an account.

For example, when I looked through 's fee information, the costs were presented around activities such as trading rather than as another Netflix-style monthly bill.

That distinction sounds obvious, but I had never really thought about it.

It made me change my spreadsheet from "subscriptions" to "recurring digital costs."

That was a much more useful category.

The annual subscriptions were the sneaky ones

Monthly charges are relatively easy to notice because they keep appearing.

Annual subscriptions are different.

You can pay for something in February, completely forget about it, and then get a surprise charge the following February.

So I took every annual service I could find and divided the price by 12.

A S$60 annual subscription, for example, became S$5 per month in my spreadsheet.

That doesn't change how much I'm spending, obviously. But it makes different services much easier to compare.

Once I did that, my real digital spending was closer to S$90 a month than the S$60 or so I initially expected.

That's roughly S$1,080 a year.

Suddenly the small charges didn't look quite so small.

I didn't cancel everything

This wasn't really an exercise in cutting every subscription possible.

Some subscriptions are genuinely worth paying for.

I use Spotify constantly. Cloud storage saves me from managing files manually. Some work tools probably save me several hours every month.

The better question turned out to be:

If this disappeared tomorrow, would I notice?

For several services, the answer was immediately yes.

For two of them, the answer was basically, "Wait, what did I use this for again?"

Those were easy cancellations.

What I do now

I kept the spreadsheet, but I don't update it every day.

Once every couple of months, I check my card statement and compare it with the list. I also added renewal dates for the annual subscriptions.

It takes maybe ten minutes.

The biggest lesson wasn't that subscriptions are bad. Most of mine are useful.

It's that digital spending is incredibly good at becoming invisible.

S$5 here, S$12 there, another S$20 somewhere else. None of it feels dramatic enough to think about.

Until you put it all on one page.