I was sitting on the sofa last Tuesday, half-watching something on Netflix I'd already seen, when I decided to scroll through my bank feed for the week. Just idle curiosity. And then I added it up. £90. Ninety quid on subscriptions and direct debits in a single week.
Not a big one-off purchase. Not an emergency. Just... recurring payments quietly stacking up like junk mail behind the front door.
That number properly annoyed me. So I'm spending April doing something about it. I'm auditing every single direct debit and subscription on my accounts — cancelling what I don't use, downgrading what I can, and bundling where it makes sense. Here's exactly how I'm doing it, step by step.
How £90 in subscriptions crept up on me
Here's the thing about recurring payments. You set them up once and then your brain files them under "dealt with." They become invisible. I thought I was being reasonably careful with money. I track my spending in Emma, I check my current account most days, and I moved my main banking to Monzo partly because the spending breakdowns are so clear.
But subscriptions are sneaky. Some bill monthly. Some bill annually (and you forget which month). Some crept up in price without me noticing. And a couple I'd genuinely forgotten existed.
That £90 week included streaming services, a gym-adjacent thing I haven't used since January, cloud storage I'm barely touching, and a couple of app subscriptions that auto-renewed. None of them felt like a big deal individually. Together? That's nearly £400 a month if every week looked like that.
It doesn't, obviously. But even conservatively, I reckon I'm spending £180–£200 a month on subscriptions. That's more than my energy bill.
Step 1: Pull every recurring payment into one place
The first job is finding them all. This is harder than it sounds because direct debits, standing orders, and card subscriptions live in different places.
Here's what I did:
- Bank statements: I exported the last three months from Monzo and my joint account. Three months catches quarterly payments that a single month might miss.
- Direct debit list: Most banks show your active direct debits separately. Monzo has this under the Payments tab. Starling does too.
- Credit card statements: Some subscriptions hit my credit card, not my current account. Easy to forget these.
- Email search: I searched my inbox for "subscription," "renewal," "your payment," and "receipt." This caught two I'd completely missed in my bank feed — one billed through PayPal and one through the App Store.
I stuck everything into a spreadsheet. Old school, but it works. For each one I logged the name, the amount, how often it bills, when it last billed, and — crucially — when I last actually used it.
That last column is the one that stings.
Step 2: Sort everything into cancel, downgrade, or keep
With the full list in front of me, I went through each line and put it in one of three buckets:
Cancel: Haven't used it in the last 30 days and can't see myself using it in the next 30. Gone. No sentimentality. This included a meditation app I used for exactly one week in February and a second cloud storage plan that duplicated what I already get free with my email.
Downgrade: I use it, but I'm paying for a premium tier I don't need. My music streaming had a family plan — except nobody else in the house was using it. Switched to individual. Saved about £7 a month. Small, but it adds up.
Keep: Genuinely use it, genuinely worth it. Netflix stays. Phone contract stays. Home insurance obviously stays.
There's a fourth category I added halfway through: bundle or switch. Some subscriptions overlap. I was paying for two different news apps when one would do. And I found I could get a discount by bundling my broadband and mobile through the same provider — something I'd been meaning to look into for months but never got round to.
I used MoneySuperMarket to check whether my broadband deal was still competitive. It wasn't. I'm now in the process of switching, which should save around £10 a month on its own.
How to cancel unused subscriptions in the UK without the faff
Cancelling sounds simple. Often it isn't. Some services bury the cancel button. Some make you phone up. Some try to guilt you with "are you sure?" screens that go on for about nine pages.
A few things that helped:
- Cancel the direct debit through your bank first. You have the legal right to cancel any direct debit at any time through your bank. You don't need the company's permission. In Monzo, you can do this in about four taps. This stops the money leaving your account immediately.
- Then cancel with the provider. This avoids them chasing you for "missed" payments. Usually a quick email or a click in their app.
- Use the Direct Debit Guarantee. If you've been charged incorrectly — say, after cancelling — you can claim it back. Your bank handles this.
- Check for annual billing traps. Some subscriptions lock you in for a year. Check your terms before cancelling mid-contract, especially things like phone insurance or breakdown cover.
Honestly, the actual cancelling took me about 40 minutes total for six subscriptions. I'd been putting it off for months. Classic.
Step 3: Set up a subscription review habit
This is the bit I always skip. I do the audit, feel smug, then slowly accumulate new subscriptions until I'm back where I started. Not this time.
I've set a recurring reminder for the first Sunday of every month. Just ten minutes. Open the spreadsheet, check what's billed in the last month, and ask: did I use this? Is it still worth it?
Plum is quite good for this too — it connects to your accounts and flags recurring payments, including ones that have gone up in price. Snoop does something similar. Either way, the point is to make the review automatic, not something you do once a year when you're feeling motivated.
What I've saved so far
I'm only halfway through April, but here's where I've landed:
- Cancelled six subscriptions: saving roughly £45/month
- Downgraded two: saving about £12/month
- Switching broadband: saving around £10/month
That's approximately £67 a month. Call it £800 a year. For about an hour's work total.
I could've done this months ago. I was literally paying £20 a month for a service I last opened in January. That's the maddening thing about subscriptions — each one feels small enough to ignore, but together they're a proper chunk of money.
The subscription audit spreadsheet I use
I've seen loads of templates online, but most are designed for US services and costs. The one I use is set up for UK direct debits specifically — columns for annual vs monthly billing, direct debit vs card payment, and a simple "last used" tracker that makes the cancel/keep decision obvious.
Free tool: Use our Subscription & Direct Debit Audit spreadsheet (free) to find out exactly where your money goes each month. See all our UK finance tools.
Just start with the bank feed
If a full audit feels like too much, do this: open your banking app right now, scroll through the last seven days, and add up every recurring payment. Just the last week. That's what I did, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea going cold next to me, and it was enough to make me actually do something about it.
You don't need a system. You don't need an app. You just need to look at the numbers and ask yourself whether each one is still earning its place. Most of them aren't.