Mustafa ERBAY

Posted on Sep 2 Originally published at mustafaerbay.com.tr

Reviewing Your Tech Subscriptions Once a Year

#subscriptions #cost #minimalism

Subscriptions are like housemates who pay rent on time and never come home. Nobody complains about them, because nobody sees them.

This is not a "cancel everything" piece. I once wrote about getting tired of subscriptions and moving things onto my own server; the thesis there was migration. The thesis here is a different one: renewing a subscription is usually not a decision you made, but a decision you never made. Sitting down once a year and actually making it matters more than cancelling. For some of them you will end up saying "keep it." That's fine — what matters is that you said it.

Why once a year and not once a month?

Monthly tracking sounds disciplined, but every frequently repeated ritual has a point where it gets dropped. I believe in rituals you can actually keep. Once a year, on a fixed date, a one-hour session: that's enough.

Pick the date to suit yourself. The start of January is a cliché but it works; the month your card renews, or the season when annual invoices pile up, works even better. I'd put it in the calendar as a recurring entry, because this task will never occur to you on its own. If it did occur to us on its own, there wouldn't be a subscription problem in the first place.

The inventory: money leaves through three separate doors

The hard part of the review isn't cancelling. It's building the list — because the payments don't sit in one place.

On the Apple side the list appears when you tap your name in the Settings app and go into Subscriptions; cancelling happens on that same screen. If you don't have an iPhone in hand, you can do the same thing in a browser at account.apple.com — that is the route the documentation puts first. On a Mac you go through account settings inside the App Store, and on Windows through the account screen in the Apple Music or Apple TV app — yes, managing subscriptions from a music app is odd, but that is how Apple's own documentation describes it.

My favourite detail in that same document is this: if you can't find a subscription in the list, it suggests searching your email for "receipt from Apple" or "invoice from Apple". In other words, the company assumes people have forgotten which account they subscribed to what with, and offers a search query as the remedy. Call it an official admission that the inventory problem is real.

On Google Play there is one sentence you need before you start reviewing, and the documentation states it plainly: uninstalling the app does not cancel the subscription. I know plenty of people who assumed the charge stopped because they deleted the icon from their phone. What got deleted was the app; the payment instruction stayed where it was.

The third door is whatever is charged straight to your card. Microsoft's documentation points at a nice trap here: if you bought your Microsoft 365 subscription through the App Store, Google Play or a retail partner, those partners provide the subscription management, and you cannot stop it from your Microsoft account. The same product bills through a different door depending on where you bought it. When you build the list, "where I subscribed" is as much a piece of information as "what I subscribed to".

A decision frame: four questions

Once the list is ready I ask four questions per line, and all four have short answers. The diagram above is the fast-forward version: the first two questions do the filtering there, and the other two are folded into the outcomes.

First: did I actually open this in the last ninety days? The gap between intention and use shows up right here. Second: would I subscribe today, from scratch, at today's price? That question exposes anything that has quietly raised its price, because most of us leave a service at the price we joined it at and never account for the current one. Third: is there a cheaper tier or an annual plan that does the same job? Fourth, and the one skipped most often: if I cancel this, what gets left behind?

That last question is a warning. Closing a subscription sometimes closes not just a service but the archive you spent years accumulating in it.

Paying twice for the same thing

The second surprise the list produces is not the unused subscriptions; it's the overlapping ones. Cloud storage is the classic example. A storage plan on the Apple side, another on the Google side, a third that came from work or with a device — all three are carrying a different half of the same photo archive, and because none of them is sufficient alone, all three stay. The only way to see this once a year is to write them side by side in a single list. Looked at separately, each one seems reasonable.

There is a second saving in the same place: sharing. Apple's documentation requires one adult in the household to set up Family Sharing as the family organiser before subscriptions can be shared. Microsoft treats sharing as natural in a 365 Family subscription; its page on turning off recurring billing notes that the people you shared the subscription with can also keep using it until the expiry date.

In practice this means two people in the same home can be paying for the same service from two separate accounts, and nobody notices, because the money leaves from two different cards. That is the only reason to run the review session together with your household. There is also a constraint Apple's documentation states outright: you can't cancel a family member's subscription. Sitting down together isn't enough; whoever's account the bill comes out of has to close it from their own device. The most concrete outcome of that hour usually comes from here.

Export the data before you cancel

So the order of the review session is: export first, cancel second. Not the other way around.

I covered the traps of exporting in detail in the piece on getting your data out of cloud services; the annual hour I suggested there is exactly the hour we're spending on subscriptions here. So one reminder is enough. Google's archive expires in about seven days, and each archive can be downloaded five times. Which means the "let me cancel now and download the data at the weekend" plan may not survive until the weekend. Start the export, then download the archive and open it. The cancel button comes after that.

Cancelling doesn't shut the door immediately

There is an invisible fear that makes the review harder: "if I cancel, will it cut off right now?" The documentation is more reassuring than I expected.

Google Play states clearly that when you cancel, you can keep using the subscription for the time you have already paid for. Microsoft separates cancelling from "turning off recurring billing": choose the second and you are not charged again, but you keep using the subscription as normal until the expiry date. For the items you are undecided about, I think that is the right move — stop the money, use the service to the end.

Apple gives the same information not on its main cancellation page but on a country-specific one — and if you're in Germany, Israel, South Africa or Türkiye, that page changes the picture in two places.

The first is reassuring: when you cancel from your device, you can keep using the subscription until the next billing date. The second may be the most concrete thing in this article. That same page states that in those four countries you have the right to cancel a subscription with immediate effect at any time, and to receive a refund for the amount corresponding to the remaining period. So if you regret an annual plan in its third month, you are not sentenced to nine more months of paying for something you use out of stubbornness.

The same page also carries a date rule worth reading carefully, and it isn't limited to trials: if you don't cancel more than 24 hours before your current billing period ends, you get charged when the new period starts. Saying "I'll cancel today" on the last day of your annual plan can mean paying for another year. Don't schedule the review session within 24 hours of a renewal date.

There is also a middle path. Some subscriptions on Google Play can be paused: the pause starts at the end of the current billing period and, depending on the app, can run from one week to three months. If you're stuck between cancelling and continuing for a service you won't touch all summer, the third option is sitting right there.

Keep some — but keep them knowingly

The measure of a good review is not how many subscriptions you cancelled. On my own list there are a few items I leave alone every year without debate: the ones tied to backups, one or two services the family shares, tools that directly speed up my work. What I pay for those is cheaper than the time I'd spend setting them up and maintaining them myself.

The difference is that I now pay that money knowingly. That is the whole return on this one-hour session: not savings, but ownership. Turning an auto-renewing instruction back into a decision that was made.

Subscriptions aren't the bad part; forgotten subscriptions are. The only thing separating the two is being curious enough to look at that list once a year.

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