How much are you spending on subscriptions — including the ones you forgot about? Add them all up and face the number.
The average American pays for 4–5 streaming services, a music app, cloud storage, a news subscription, a fitness app, and several others they've completely forgotten about. Added together, most people's subscription total is $200–400 per month — a number that would feel shocking as a single bill but sneaks by unnoticed because it's spread across a dozen separate charges.
The "graveyard" refers to the subscriptions you signed up for, stopped using, and never got around to cancelling. A $15/month subscription you haven't opened in a year has cost you $180 without giving you anything in return. This calculator makes all of it visible at once — the active subscriptions, the guilty ones, and the forgotten ones — so you can make conscious decisions about what's actually worth keeping.
The 5-year total is the number most people find genuinely sobering. $250 a month in subscriptions is $15,000 over five years. That context — seeing it as a lump sum rather than a monthly trickle — often prompts a serious audit of what's actually being used.
Research from various personal finance studies suggests the average American spends $200–400 per month on subscriptions when all services are counted — streaming, music, cloud storage, fitness apps, software, news, and others. Most people significantly underestimate their total. A 2022 study found consumers underestimated their subscription spending by an average of $133 per month.
Free trials that automatically converted to paid plans after a forgotten cancellation date, annual subscriptions that only charge once a year and are easy to overlook, apps downloaded for a specific purpose that are no longer used, cloud storage plans across multiple devices, and services that raised their prices without a noticeable notification are the most common culprits.
Financial advisors typically recommend a quarterly subscription audit — four times a year is enough to catch price increases, trial conversions, and services you have stopped using. Doing this in January, April, July, and October aligns with the natural re-evaluation points most people experience around seasonal changes and new year planning.
Check your bank and credit card statements for recurring charges — filter by recurring and look back 13 months to catch annual subscriptions. Check your email inbox for subscription confirmation and billing emails. Review your phone's app store subscription management section which lists all active in-app subscriptions. Your bank statement method is the most comprehensive.
The average person has 2–3 subscriptions they are actively paying for but rarely or never use, worth an estimated $40–70 per month. Cancelling those alone saves $480–840 per year. Over 5 years that is $2,400–4,200 in savings from subscriptions you were not getting value from anyway.