How to Manage Your Subscriptions and Save Money
If you’ve ever looked at your bank statement and thought, “What on earth is that $16.99 for?”, you’re not alone. Subscriptions are one of the sneakiest ways money quietly leaks out of Australian households.
The good news? It’s also one of the easiest things to change. Half an hour with a cuppa and your bank statement could save you hundreds of dollars a year.
What is subscription creep?
Subscription creep is the slow build-up of small, recurring payments over time. One streaming service becomes three. A free trial you meant to cancel starts charging you. A gym membership that keeps ticking along, whether you go or not.
Each payment seems small on its own. But together, they add up fast. Research from Westpac in 2025 found we spend almost 20 per cent more on subscriptions than we think we do. Three in ten Australians admit to losing up to $600 a year on duplicate services and apps they no longer use. ING research found Australians spent around $11.4 billion on discretionary subscriptions in 2024, and 8.4 million of us are paying for non-essential subscriptions we aren’t even using.
Why it catches so many of us out
Subscriptions are designed to be forgettable. They renew automatically in the background. No reminder, just a quiet debit from your account.
The most common traps are forgetting to cancel a free trial before it starts charging, paying for two services that do the same thing, and simply losing track of what you signed up for. Some companies also make cancelling harder than signing up — nearly one in three Australians say they’ve had trouble cancelling a subscription.
Finding your subscriptions
Go through three months of bank statements for every account and credit card you have. Three months matters because some subscriptions bill quarterly or annually, not monthly. Highlight anything that repeats — streaming, apps, news sites, gym, cloud storage, wine clubs, the lot.
Then check the places subscriptions like to hide:
- Your phone or tablet. On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings, tap your name, then tap Subscriptions. On an Android phone, open the Google Play Store app, tap your profile picture, then Payments and Subscriptions. You may be surprised what’s lurking there.
- PayPal. Log in, go to Settings, then Payments, then Automatic Payments. Many subscriptions bill through PayPal rather than your card directly.
- Your email. Search your inbox for words like “receipt”, “renewal” or “subscription” to catch anything you’ve missed.
Write everything down with the monthly cost next to it. Seeing the total in black and white is usually all the motivation you need.
Decide what stays and what goes
For each subscription, ask yourself two simple questions: When did I last use this? and Would I sign up again today at this price? If you can’t remember the last time you used it, or you’d hesitate to pay for it fresh, it goes.
Watch especially for duplicates. Do you really need Netflix, Stan, Binge and Disney+? Streaming is the most wasted subscription in Australia, and unused gym memberships are the most expensive. Compare the Market found people paying for gyms they don’t attend are wasting around $93 a month, or over $1,100 a year.
Cancel the ones you don’t need
Most subscriptions can be cancelled in a few minutes online — log into your account on the service’s website, look for “Manage subscription” or “Account settings”, and follow the prompts. For anything billed through the App Store, Google Play or PayPal, cancel it in those same settings screens mentioned above.
A few tips to make it painless:
- Many services offer a discount when you try to leave. If it’s genuinely a good deal for something you use, take it. If not, cancel it.
- Cancel in writing where you can. For gyms and services with contracts, an email creates a paper trail. Check your contract for notice periods.
- You usually keep access until the end of the billing period, so there’s no reason to wait — cancel today.
- If a company makes cancelling unreasonably difficult, you can complain to the ACCC or your state’s consumer affairs body. You can also ask your bank to stop a recurring card payment if a merchant won’t cooperate.
Manage remaining subscriptions
A little routine stops the creep coming back. Set a reminder in your calendar to review your subscriptions every six months — the same day you check your smoke alarm batteries works nicely. When you start a free trial, set a phone reminder for two days before it ends. And consider a rotation strategy for streaming: subscribe to one service, watch what you want over a month or two, cancel, then move to the next. You’ll never run out of things to watch, and you’ll only ever pay for one at a time.
Many Australian banks now show your recurring payments in their apps, which makes keeping an eye on things much easier — ask your bank or check your banking app’s tools.
Even a few changes to your subscriptions, such as dropping two streaming services and one unused app, can easily save you $400 or more a year. Subscription creep thrives on being ignored. Spend half an hour of your attention this week and save yourself some money.
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