How much do subscriptions cost a month? $219, not the $86 you guessed

A subscription is designed to be forgotten. That is the business model, not a side effect, and the research on it is blunt about how well it works. Here is what the surveys and the card data say, and how to find every recurring charge a household is paying for.

How much does the average person spend on subscriptions?

In a 2022 survey of a thousand American consumers, people were first asked to estimate their monthly subscription spend, then walked through the categories one by one. The average guess was $86; the average total was $219, two and a half times as much. Streaming, cloud storage, apps, deliveries, memberships: each one small, each one billed to a card nobody reads line by line.

The gap is the interesting number, more than the total. A household that knows it spends $219 a month on subscriptions has a decision to make. A household that believes it spends $86 has no decision to make, because the other $133 does not exist for it. Over a year that is roughly $1,600 of spending with no owner.

Why do people forget subscriptions?

Einav, Klopack and Mahoney went past surveys to the payment records themselves. They looked at what happens to subscription renewals when a customer's card is replaced, which forces the merchant to ask for new details, a moment when the subscriber has to actively decide to keep paying. Cancellations spike sharply in exactly those months, and the authors estimate that inattention, people simply not noticing the charge, is worth a substantial share of subscription revenue.

The subscribers who cancelled at card replacement were not people who had decided to keep the service. They were people who had never decided anything.

The finding has a mirror image that matters for a household: the forgetting is per-card. If two partners have three cards between them, a subscription can sit on one card for a year without the person who reads the other two ever seeing it. The same mechanism that makes card spending feel free makes a recurring card charge invisible.

PeakFinance does this from your own data. Save more, and see exactly where the household stands. Join the free beta →

Why regulators tried to make cancelling easier

The business model has not gone unnoticed. On 16 October 2024 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a “click-to-cancel” rule requiring that cancelling a subscription be as simple as signing up. It did not survive: in July 2025 the Eighth Circuit vacated the rule on procedural grounds, and the Commission's own litigation report says it may draw on it in a future proposal.

The practical lesson for a household is that the friction is not going away by law any time soon. Whatever makes a forgotten charge visible has to be something you run yourself.

How to find every subscription you are paying for

1. Pull three months of transactions from every card and account in the household, not just the one you read. The card you do not read is where the forgotten ones live.
2. Sort by merchant and look for the same amount at the same interval: monthly, quarterly, yearly. A merchant that charges $12.99 on the 7th three months running is a subscription whether or not you remember signing up.
3. Include annual charges. They are the easiest to forget and the most expensive to miss, and three months of statements may not contain one; look back a year for those.
4. Write each one down with its owner: whose card, whose service, or the household's. A streaming plan on one partner's card that the whole family watches is a household cost; a hobby app is personal.
5. Give the list a row in the budget. In a zero-based household budget subscriptions are a fixed row with a known total, so the $219 is a number you planned rather than one you discover.

Which subscriptions are worth cancelling?

Not all of them. The useful question is not “do we have too many” but “which of these has stopped earning its place”. Three signals from the ledger do most of the work, and none of them requires anyone to remember anything.

The saving from this is unusual in that it costs nothing: no change in habits, no cheaper brand, no smaller flat. It is the same kind of money as the gift cards that go unspent every year, value that already belongs to the household and is only lost because nobody is looking.

What a ledger that notices looks like

The defence is not willpower, it is a system that raises the charge at the moment it is worth a decision. A merchant that charges the same amount at the same interval is a recurring charge whether or not anyone declared it; a recurring charge whose price rose this month is a decision to remake; and a recurring charge with no other sign of use for a month or two is one to question.

For a couple the extra requirement is that the system sees every card, not just the one the budgeter reads. Many of the apps in the budgeting-apps comparison detect recurring charges on connected accounts; fewer show whose card each one sits on, which is the detail that stops the per-card forgetting.

How PeakFinance does it

PeakFinance derives recurring-charge candidates from the ledger itself and asks the household to confirm or dismiss each one, once: a “not a subscription” is stored so the same question is not asked again next month. Confirmed subscriptions get their own tab, an annual cost, and alerts when a price rises or a service goes unused, like a streaming plan charged for 41 days with nothing watched.

The annual saving opportunity on the insights screen counts only subscriptions that have gone quiet and price rises nobody agreed to, never the ones the household is plainly using, and it is stated as what dropping them adds to savings over a year, because that is where the money goes. Whose card it sits on is part of the row, so a charge on one partner's card is visible to both.

Hen Eytan · Founder, UPeak

Builds the UPeak apps and writes up the research behind them.