You remember the deal. Cancel Foxtel, save $109 a month, watch what you want when you want. Sounded great in 2018. Look at your bank statement now and tell me how that worked out.
I added it up for our household last week. We’re paying for Netflix, Stan, Disney+, Binge, Kayo for the footy, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ (because we have an iPhone), and Spotify Family. Add a couple of newspapers and a fitness app and we’re sitting at $163 a month. We were paying $109 for Foxtel and complaining about it.
How we got here
It happened slowly, which is the dangerous bit. Each one made sense at the time.
- Stan was for one show your partner wanted to watch.
- Disney+ was for the kids during lockdown.
- Binge was for the British detective shows that’re only on Foxtel.
- Kayo because the AFL only works on Kayo.
- Amazon Prime because you wanted free shipping for Christmas, and the video came along for the ride.
None of these felt like big decisions. That’s the design. Each one is $10 to $20, billed monthly, easy to ignore, painful to cancel because you’ll lose your watch list and there’s a season of something you swore you’d get back to.
Where the money actually goes
The honest test is to look at the last three months and ask which services you actually opened. Not which ones you might use. Which ones you used.
For our household, Netflix and Kayo are unmissable. Spotify gets used daily. Disney+ goes through cycles, mainly when something new for the kids drops. The rest were either dormant or only opened to watch one specific thing, which we then forgot about for two months while still being billed.
Most households I’ve checked with are paying for at least 3 to 4 services they don’t actively use. At an average of $14 a month, that’s $50 to $60 a month gone, which is $600 to $720 a year. Same as a decent overseas trip, give or take.
The fix that actually works
Not cold turkey. Cold turkey doesn’t work because the things you actually want to watch are scattered across providers, and the cancel-and-resub merry-go-round is exactly what these services count on.
What works is the rotate strategy. Pick the two or three you actually use. Keep them. The rest, you sign up for one month at a time, watch what you wanted to watch, then cancel. Most providers have an easy resubscribe flow because they want you back. Use that against them.
It feels petty for $14 a month. But $14 times 6 dormant subscriptions is real money over a year. And once you’re in the habit of treating monthly subs as opt-in instead of default, you stop accumulating them.
Why the Funance Subscriptions tab matters here
The whole reason this is hard is that no one shows you the running total. Your bank doesn’t. Your card statement buries them in a list of 80 transactions. Each provider only ever shows you their own bill, never the others.
The Subscriptions tab in Funance Pro lists all of them on one screen with a monthly and annual total. When you see "your subs are costing you $1,956 a year," the conversation in your head changes. Suddenly cancelling the one you don’t use isn’t petty, it’s obvious.
That’s also where the partner-split logic helps. We track which subs are mine, which are my wife’s, and which are shared. Stops the "I thought you cancelled that" arguments.
What to do this weekend
Sit down with your last three credit card and bank statements. List every recurring charge under $50. Tag each one as using, not using, or not sure.
The not using column is your shopping list. Cancel them today. The not sure column gets a 30-day trial: don’t open it for a month, see if you missed it, decide.
This is the kind of small win that’s genuinely worth doing. Half an hour of admin, $50 a month back in your pocket. That’s a $1,000 pay rise, after tax, for an afternoon’s work.
And if you want it tracked properly so it doesn’t creep back, well, that’s why we built the tab.