The new year often brings sticker shock. A glance at our bank statements and credit card accounts shows how much we spent during the holidays, and is a painful reminder that now that the festivities are behind us, we need to work on getting our spending under control.
A good first step to do that is to cancel unnecessary subscriptions, whether that’s Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, or another service you pay for monthly but don’t use. These unnecessary subscriptions can add up, especially if prices continue to rise to rise.
A 2025 CNET report found that the average American adult spends $17 per month on subscriptions they don’t use – that’s more than $200 per year. (A self-finance study from the same year found that subscribers wasted less on unused subscriptions ($10.57 per month, but that’s still more than $120 per year).
Unfortunately, canceling a subscription is not always easy. But if you want to stop wasting money by 2026, eliminating unnecessary subscriptions is essential. Here’s how to quickly find and cancel your subscription.
Track your forgotten subscriptions
I’ve known people who were surprised to discover that they had been paying for a subscription for years that they had completely forgotten about, so they were literally wasting money every month on something they weren’t even using.
That’s why, if you want to stop wasting money on unnecessary subscriptions, you need to find yours first. Fortunately, the digital nature of the payment methods we use can help us track down forgotten subscriptions:
- Check your bank and credit card statements for recurring charges from the same supplier. This is the biggest tip that you have a subscription that you forgot.
- If you often subscribe to services through apps on your iPhone or Android, you may have signed up for them through Apple or Google’s in-app purchasing system. Apple and Google both make it easy to see which recurring subscriptions you’re signed up for. Here’s how to find these plans on an iPhone and on an Android phone.
- You may be subscribed to a service through an app’s special sign-in page. Check your account settings in any apps that offer subscriptions to see if you have subscriptions there.
- People also often subscribe to streaming TV channels (like Hallmark+ or Crunchroll) through third-party services, so it’s smart to check if you have recurring subscriptions to those platforms as well. Here’s how to tell if you’re paying for additional subscriptions Amazon Prime Video, AppleTVor YouTube.
The above points are not exhaustive, but you should be able to find most of your subscriptions this way.
Cancel subscriptions with your iPhone or Android
Once you’ve identified all your unnecessary subscriptions, the next step is to cancel them. The cancellation process varies depending on how you signed up.
- If you signed in through an app’s dedicated login page, open the app and navigate to the account settings. You should see an option to cancel a subscription there (sometimes the app will direct you to a website, email address, or phone number to use to cancel).
- If you signed up through an in-app purchase from the Apple App Store, open your iPhone’s Settings app, tap your Apple account name, then tap Subscriptions. There, find the one you want to cancel.
- If you signed up through an in-app purchase from the Google Play Store, open the Google Play Store app and tap your profile, account, then Payments & subscriptions. Tap the subscription you want to find the cancel button for.
Cancel your subscriptions quickly online
Finally, some subscriptions require you to sign up or cancel through a web page, or at least allow you to cancel from any web browser. Here are some quick links to help pages for common subscriptions that explain how to cancel them.
- Amazon Music Stand
- Amazon music unlimited
- Amazon Prime
- Amazon Prime Video
- Apple music
- AppleTV
- Disney+
- DoorDash
- ESPN
- Grubhub
- HBOMax
- Hulu
- Netflix
- Biggest+
- Peacock
- Spotify Premium
- Uber eats
- Uber One
- YouTube Music Premium
- YouTube premium
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