Eleven. That is the number the audit app put on the screen, and I was sitting in a dentist's waiting room at 2:40 on a Thursday while my wife read the same number off her phone from across the room and mouthed it at me twice. Eleven subscriptions. Neither of us could name five.
The app was Rocket Money, free tier, linked to our joint checking on the dentist's wifi, and it did in ninety seconds what we had failed to do in four years of saying we should honestly go thru these. The monthly total across the eleven: $164.36. Annualized: $1,972.32. We were eleven months into saving a $3,800 down payment for a minivan, which means the subscriptions were quietly eating half a van per year.
We cancelled nine of the eleven inside a week. The two that survived got written reasons, one paragraph each, taped inside the kitchen cabinet where the trash bags live. And the ninth cancellation, a $9.99 wallpaper app, took three phone calls, cuz the company that made it had been dead for a year and the billing had not.
the list, all eleven
The roster, top to bottom: Max, $22.99. Netflix, $24.99, the premium tier, for the 4K television we bought in 2021. Spotify Duo, $16.99. YouTube Premium, $13.99. Amazon Prime, monthly, $14.99. Audible, $14.95. Duolingo Super, $12.99. Adobe Photography plan, $19.99. iCloud, 2 terabytes, $9.99. A wallpaper app called Vellum, $9.99, origin unknown, billed since March 2024. Google One, $2.99. Add them yourself: $164.36, every month, rain or shine, whether anyone remembered any of them or not.
the van fund math
$1,972.32 a year against a $3,800 van target. My wife did that division at the dentist's front desk before they called her back, and her verdict on the drive home was short: half a van a year, for apps nobody could name. The fund sat at $2,340 that Thursday. The monitor in my office got a sticky note that said 164.36, and it stayed there for months as a dare.
the nine that went
The cancellations took one evening each for the hard ones and one tap for the easy ones. Max: the show finished in January, gone. YouTube Premium: we watched ads for a week and survived. Duolingo: my 380-day streak died that night, and I have made peace with it, mostly. Adobe: Snapseed is free and does the one thing I actually did with Lightroom. Audible: the library's Libby app had been sitting on my phone the whole time, free, faster than my credits. Google One: merged into the iCloud we were already paying for. Prime: switched to the annual plan on a sale. Netflix: the hardest one, member since 2013, and the app's own receipt history put our lifetime spend north of $2,600. Gone anyways.
the ghost app
Vellum was the problem child. The wallpaper app billed thru its own website, not the App Store, so there was no subscription page to visit and no toggle to flip. The company, two people in Tallinn judging by the last blog post, had shut down in 2024 and left the billing pipe running. Call one: the bank, which read the merchant name into the void. Call two: the support email, which auto-replied to itself forever. Call three: the bank's dispute form, filed with screenshots. Refund received: $19.98, two months back. Card token killed. That made nine.
the two that stayed
Spotify Duo stayed, reason on tape: two drivers, two kids with swim-practice playlists, $16.99, and the car is where music happens in this family. iCloud 2TB stayed, reason on tape: 42,318 photos across twelve years, the oldest being my wife's grandmother on a porch in June 2011, and $9.99 is the rent on the only archive that matters. The paragraphs are taped inside the cabinet, in pen, her handwriting on one, mine on the other.
friday night, no clicks
New monthly total: $26.98. The first weekend felt peculiar in a way I did not expect. Friday night, couch, the old scroll reflex fired and found nothin' new to open, nothing queued, nothing asking me to make a decision about entertainment for the first time in years. The audit app's cancellation page shows nine green checkmarks. I have looked at that page more than at any statement this month.
the van fund, again
The first post-audit deposit hit the van fund on the 15th: $137.38, the exact monthly difference, moved on purpose instead of evaporating on purpose. The fund read $2,477.38 that day. The minivan is supposed to happen in November, and for the first time since we began the fund, the math agrees with the calendar.
the cabinet door
It is late March now, and the sticky note on my monitor still says 164.36, crossed out once with 26.98 written underneath. The dentist visit cost $280 for two fillings, which made it the most expensive thing that happened that Thursday and still cheap next to what the app found. The two paragraphs are still taped inside the cabinet door, and every guest who reaches for the trash bags reads about my wife's grandmother on the porch. That is it. That is the whole audit.
