How to notice when a subscription puts its price up

The reliable way to notice a subscription price rise is to keep the renewal date next to the amount, and to check the amount against the actual charge on the day it renews. That is it. Every other method depends on reading an email that arrived six weeks before the change and looked like marketing.

Why these are so easy to miss

A price rise has none of the features that make something noticeable. It is small, so it does not stand out on a statement. It is announced far in advance, so it is forgotten by the time it happens. It arrives in an email whose subject line is about terms and conditions. And it repeats quietly from then on, so the moment to catch it passes once and does not come back.

In a shared household there is a further step: the person who set the subscription up gets the email, and the person looking at the budget is often somebody else.

The column that does the work

Whatever you keep your subscriptions in, the useful field is not the amount. It is the day of the month it renews. An amount tells you what you thought it cost. A renewal date tells you when to look.

• Name, and where it renews. The app store, the card, or the account. This matters when you eventually want to cancel it.
• Amount, as last verified rather than as first typed.
• Renewal date. The day of the month, or the full date for anything annual.
• Last checked. One date, updated when you confirm the amount is still right. This is the column that turns a list into something trustworthy.

📅Annual subscriptions are where the real drift happens. Twelve months is long enough to forget the price entirely, and long enough for two rises to have happened. Put the full date next to those, not just the day.

The monthly check, in about five minutes

Once a month, look at the entries whose renewal date has just passed and compare the amount you have written down with what actually came out. You are not auditing anything. You are checking a handful of numbers against a handful of numbers, and most months they will match.

When one does not match, change it in one place and note the date. The point of the last-checked column is that you never have to wonder whether a figure is current.

What to do when you find one

Multiply the difference by twelve before deciding anything. A rise of two dollars a month is twenty four dollars a year, and that is the number worth reacting to, in either direction. Plenty of price rises are worth paying and it is much easier to say so once you have seen the annual figure rather than the monthly one.

If you decide it is not worth it, cancel it there and then rather than adding it to a list. The list is where cancellations go to die.

Why a spreadsheet struggles with this specifically

A cell holds whatever was last typed into it, and it will hold it confidently for years. There is nothing about a stale figure in a spreadsheet that looks stale. That is fine for rent, which you would notice changing, and it is exactly wrong for the eleven small amounts that were set up once and never thought about again.