I hit a moment two months ago where my bank statement stopped making sense.
Line after line: Claude Pro ($20), ChatGPT Plus ($20), GitHub Copilot ($10), Notion AI ($10), Perplexity ($20), Midjourney ($10). I didn't even use half of them regularly. I just kept renewing because canceling felt like effort.
So I did something I'd been avoiding: I sat down and actually counted.
The Full Picture
Here's what I was paying for, roughly bucketed:
AI Writing/Chat:
- Claude Pro — $20/mo (used daily for coding + writing)
- ChatGPT Plus — $20/mo (used maybe twice a week)
- Perplexity Pro — $20/mo (used for research, maybe 3x/week)
AI Coding:
- GitHub Copilot — $10/mo (used constantly)
- Cursor Pro — $20/mo (overlap with Copilot, mostly ignored)
Design/Productivity:
- Figma — $15/mo (legitimate, daily)
- Notion AI — $10/mo (duplicate of Claude for writing)
- Linear — $8/mo (barely touched since switching to GitHub Projects)
Total: ~$123/month
I was spending over $1,400 a year on subscriptions I'd assembled organically over 18 months, without ever stopping to ask: do I actually need this?
The Audit Process
The first step was embarrassingly manual. I exported my bank statement, filtered by recurring charges, and built a spreadsheet. It took about 90 minutes.
I rated each subscription on two axes: how often I actually used it, and whether something else I already paid for covered the same use case.
The duplicates were immediately obvious:
ChatGPT Plus vs Claude Pro: I kept both because I told myself they had different strengths. Technically true. Practically, I was using Claude for 90% of tasks. The ChatGPT subscription was mostly habit. I found this side-by-side breakdown useful when I was trying to decide which one to drop — the feature overlap is bigger than most people realize.
Cursor Pro vs GitHub Copilot: Cursor is excellent, but I'd been defaulting to Copilot's inline suggestions and rarely opening Cursor's full editor. Paying $30/mo for two code completion tools is hard to justify.
Notion AI vs Claude: Notion AI is convenient inside Notion, but for anything beyond summarization, I was copy-pasting into Claude anyway.
What I Cut
I canceled ChatGPT Plus, Cursor Pro, and Notion AI. That's $50/month, $600/year, gone without meaningfully changing how I work.
I kept the Perplexity subscription, which I debated. The search-native experience is genuinely different from asking Claude for research — Perplexity gives me source citations inline, which matters when I'm investigating something I need to trust. Worth the $20 to me.
The trickier decision was Linear. I've used it for two years on side projects and genuinely prefer it over GitHub Projects. But $8/month for something I touch twice a week on projects that make $0 is a luxury I can probably live without for now.
The Patterns I Noticed
Trial-to-paid momentum is real. Four of my subscriptions started as free trials I just didn't cancel. The mental overhead of "I'll evaluate this later" compounds into a lot of money.
Annual plans are a commitment trick. I had two annual subscriptions that I'd forgotten about, one of which I would have canceled months earlier if I'd seen the charge monthly. The discount isn't worth it if the tool stops being useful.
Overlap isn't always obvious. I spent three days being annoyed that Cursor wasn't "clicking" for me before I realized I'd never actually disabled Copilot — I had two auto-completion engines fighting each other.
What This Actually Saved
After the audit:
- Canceled: ChatGPT Plus, Cursor Pro, Notion AI, Linear = $58/mo saved
- Downgraded: Perplexity to annual = $4/mo saved (yearly rate)
- Renegotiated nothing, because these platforms don't negotiate
That's roughly $750/year from one afternoon of attention.
The Bigger Lesson
I'm not particularly careless with money. I'm a developer who reads HN, thinks about unit economics, cares about efficiency. And I still ended up with $1,400/year in subscriptions without noticing.
The problem isn't that I'm bad at budgets. It's that modern SaaS is designed to be invisible. Monthly billing, frictionless onboarding, smooth renewal emails. The cognitive load of tracking it accumulates invisibly.
The fix isn't complicated — it's just intentional. Quarterly audits take less than two hours and have outsized returns. I've added it to my calendar. For non-AI subscriptions — streaming, productivity, cloud storage — I also started checking whether shared or family plans existed. The savings were surprisingly large; Netflix goes from $22.99 to under $8 on a shared plan. SubSaver was helpful for comparing those options across services.
If you've never done this: pick a Sunday, export your statements, and actually look. You'll find something you forgot you were paying for.
What's the most surprising subscription you've found during an audit? Curious if the AI tool overlap is as common as I think.
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