General Discussion > Throw Down the Gauntlet

I'm in subscription hell

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Emily2651:
[Caveat: I am newly returning to frugality after a lengthy hiatus. Much work to do.]

Thanks to Prime Day, today I took stock of how many freakin' subscriptions we have in our household. It's out of control.

- Amazon Prime ($119/year)
- Spotify ($9.99/month)
- Thrive Market ($59.95/year)
- Calm app ($59.99/year)
- NYT online/Sunday delivery ($41/month)
- Idler online/print (£125/year)
- Nautilus print subscription ($39/year)
- Photoshop ($9.99/month)
- YNAB ($50/year)

!YIKES! The annual cost of this mess is $1225.24.

I am horrified.

I've already stopped Amazon Prime from auto-renewing. I'm also going to shed Thrive, Calm, the NYT; won't renew the Idler and Nautilus. For now, I'll keep Spotify and YNAB; husband says he can't give up Photoshop. Total annual savings: $935.48. It's a start.

Am I the only one with ridiculous subscriptions? 

englishteacheralex:
I hate subscriptions and avoid them like the plague. Here's what we have:

1. Amazon Prime (I hate it. DH likes the streaming entertainment options. I'm trying to get him to cancel it.)
2. Netflix (Not a big fan of this, either. I used to like it when it was DVDs; the options were way better. But Netflix is helpful if you have kids, which we do. And we do watch plenty of shows on it.)
3. NYT ($7/month online subscription--I get an educator discount. I read hundreds of articles/month so I really get the use out of this.)
4. Ranger Rick (a Christmas present for my son. He loves getting the actual magazine in the mail. I think it was $12 for the year?)

Other than that we have no subscriptions IIRC. Anything monthly gives me hives.

Raymond Reddington:
Ouch.

We dropped all magazine and newspaper subscriptions a while ago. There is plenty of interesting, free content out there, and the costs of subscriptions are almost never justified. For every interesting event we hear of through a magazine, it could be just as easily discovered through Facebook or other means, and there is tons of free content out there if you want to pick up knowledge or skills, so learning from a paper or magazine is almost never worth the cost because the majority of what comes in doesn't get read anyway.

I've always been good with spreadsheets, so we've never been tempted to pay for any sort of budgeting apps, but that's an individual decision.

Food subscriptions are a tough call. I'd say you have to weight the cost of your annual savings on food through the subscription vs. the alternative. Food is definitely an area we are looking to cut expenses too. We occasionally get Blue Apron. My wife is an excellent chef, but cooking for two is hard due to portion size and Blue Apron is good with that, plus it gives her recipes that she can tweak or try to recreate on the cheap later. It's nice every once in a while, but we try not to do it too often. It's an ongoing process, and we're still trying to find the optimal mix while generally eating healthy.

The sleeping app, unless one of you has an extreme difficulty sleeping, I'd look to drop. And even if you do, a white noise machine can be purchased for less than the yearly cost of that app.

soccerluvof4:
We went through this awhile ago and now have that we pay for just Netflix, Spotify for the 2 kids in college and MLS package which was Birthday gift for my son which is $4.99 a month. That obviously doesnt include interenet and stuff but otherwise that its. No magazines or things of that nature and that all comes to about 30$ a month. We bought Roku's for the tv's a while back and that has alot of content as well and has paid for its self over and over again and removed any buffering problems. They were only like 50$ a piece and they as I said have a ton of free content.

Dee18:
Keep in mind you can do free trials with most subscription services.  And you can repeat those each year.  Or you can sign up for a month, and then drop the subscription.  Amazon prime might be handy at the holiday season if you would otherwise mail some gifts, so get the trial then.  Also, check with your library.  Mine has services called Overdrive and Hoopla that provide all kinds of media content....way more than I have time for.

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