Revel Roots

what apps actually cost

The Audit: One Hour

Everything else on this site is about individual decisions. This is the one that catches whatever those missed, and it takes about an hour a year.

Pick a fixed date. Anniversaries work; a birthday, the start of a tax year, the first Sunday of a month you remember. For a workplace cost comparison, this article provides another example of how recurring software turns time or labor into a billed metric.

The six sources

Every one holds charges the others do not.

Your card statements, twelve months, all cards. For broader context on recurring costs, billing, or household software spending, Apple billing support provides an outside reference point.

Your bank statements, for direct debits, which are a separate mechanism and easy to miss.

PayPal or equivalent, which bills separately and shows up on the card as one merged line.

The Apple subscription list. Settings, your name, Subscriptions. Shows everything bought through the platform including things you forgot exist.

The Google Play subscription list. Play Store, profile, Payments and subscriptions.

And your bundles. Phone contract, productivity suite, device ecosystem, credit card benefits — capabilities you are already paying for that do not appear as subscriptions anywhere.

The two platform lists are the fastest wins. Most people have never opened them, and they take two minutes each.

What to record

One row each, five columns.

Name. Annual cost. Not monthly.

What job it does — storage, video, notes, tracking. This is the column that finds duplication.

Used in the last month? Yes or no.

And starting price, if you can find it. The gap between then and now is usually larger than expected.

The three decisions

Sort by annual cost, descending. The order is rarely what people expect.

One. The unused. Anything with "no" in the used column. Easy cancellations, no capability lost, and usually two or three items.

Two. The duplicated. Two rows with the same job. Check the bundled version first — it has usually improved — then cancel the redundant one.

Three. The re-decided. Everything remaining, at its current price. Not "is this worth what I originally paid" but "would I subscribe today at this price." That question produces most of the cancellations, and it is the one the monthly framing prevents you from ever asking.

While you are there

Three things worth doing in the same hour.

Export from anything holding your data. It doubles as a backup and verifies the export still works.

Check for annual plans on anything you are definitely keeping. A genuine discount if you were staying anyway.

And cancel at the platform, not in the app, which takes four taps and produces a confirmation. Screenshot each one.

What to expect

A total higher than your estimate. Two thirds of people are out by more than $200 a month.

Two or three charges you cannot identify without looking them up.

One item that has roughly doubled in price since you started.

And one duplicate you would not have found any other way.

That is the normal result. It is also why the hour is worth spending: none of those four is visible from inside the year, and all four are visible in an hour once you look at everything together.

The short version