Remember when your cable bill was $70 per month and you thought it was incredible to save so much money switching to Netflix for $10 per month?
What happened? Today you likely have multiple streaming subscriptions from Netflix to HBO to Disney+ to Peacock and more. Conveniently, they all add up to about the same $70 we were paying before…
In a business, the problem can be even worse…For two years, we paid for a $1,300 per month subscription on our business PayPal account with no clue what it was for (my guess is my spendy business partner signed us up for an SEO software, his guilty pleasure, and forgot about it).
That’s over $15,000 in waste.
That was not my only wasted subscription… I’ve incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional waste due to not keeping a close eye on subscriptions.
From the business’s standpoint, a subscription is great. You get money every single month from the customer. She has to go out of her way to not give you money. It’s amazing.
From the consumer’s standpoint, it’s terrible. Anytime I want to cancel my Wall Street Journal subscription, which is about $40 per quarter by the way, I have to call them (yes, call them) to cancel it. What do I do instead? Just let it keep running.
Annual subscriptions are even worse. You end up signing up for software to save 20% over the year to only not want to use it anymore after six months. The monthly option is better 99% of the time.
Review your subscriptions today. Review the ones you are charged personally for and, if you own your own business, review all the subscriptions your company pays for. See what you can cancel. Aim to cancel enough so you save at least $1,000 a year.