The new year often brings sticker shock. A glance at our bank statements and credit card bills shows just how much we spent during the holidays, serving as a painful reminder that with the festivities behind us, we should work on getting our expenditures under control.
A good first step toward doing that is to cancel unnecessary subscriptions—whether that’s Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, or any other service you pay for monthly but don’t use. These unnecessary subscriptions can add up—especially as prices continue to rise.
A 2025 CNET report found that the average U.S. adult spends $17 a month on subscriptions they don’t use—that’s more than $200 a year. (A Self Financial study from the same year found subscribers were wasting less on unused subscriptions—$10.57 per month—but that’s still more than $120 per year).
Unfortunately, canceling a subscription isn’t always straightforward. Yet if you want to stop burning through money in 2026, axing unnecessary subscriptions is essential. Here’s how to quickly find and cancel yours.
Track down your forgotten subscriptions
I’ve known people who were surprised to discover they’d been paying for a subscription for years that they had completely forgotten about, and thus had been literally wasting money each month on something they didn’t even use.
That’s why, if you want to stop wasting money on unnecessary subscriptions, you first need to find all yours. Thankfully, the digital nature of the payment methods we use can help us track down forgotten subscriptions:
- Check your bank and credit card statements for any recurring fees from the same vendor. This is the biggest tip-off that you have a subscription you’ve forgotten about.
- If you tend to subscribe to services via apps on your iPhone or Android, you may have signed up for them using Apple’s or Google’s in-app purchase system. Apple and Google both make it easy to see what recurring subscriptions you are signed up for. Here’s how to find those subscriptions on an iPhone and on an Android phone.
- You may have subscribed to a service via an app’s dedicated signup page. You should check your account settings in all apps that offer subscriptions to see if you have any 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 any recurring subscriptions on those platforms, too. Here’s how to see if you’re paying for any extra subscriptions through Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, or YouTube.
The points above aren’t exhaustive, but you should be able to find most of your subscriptions this way.
Cancel subscriptions using your iPhone or Android
Once you’ve tracked down all your unnecessary subscriptions, the next step is to cancel them. The cancellation process will differ depending on how you signed up.
- If you signed up via an app’s dedicated signup page, open the app and navigate to its account settings. You should see a subscription cancellation option there (sometimes the app may point you to a website, email, or phone number you need to use to cancel).
- If you signed up via an in-app purchase on the Apple App Store, open your iPhone’s Settings app, tap your Apple Account name, and tap Subscriptions. Find the one you want to cancel there.
- If you signed up via an in-app purchase on 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 cancellation button for.
Quickly cancel your subscriptions online
Finally, some subscriptions require you to sign up or cancel on a web page—or at least allow you to cancel from any web browser. Here are some shortcuts to help pages for common subscriptions that explain how to cancel them.
