Mind the Gap
Every month I go through the same ritual: I open my banking app, stare at my paycheck, and try to work out where the hell it went. The house loan, I've made peace with, that's a separate article, possibly a separate therapy session. The electricity, the internet, the water, the gas: fine, deserves its own book, we'll get there. But this weekend I finally sat down to do a proper financial audit, after spending the previous two weekends, yes, two, tidying my sock drawer instead of dealing with anything that actually mattered.
I was ready. I was prepared for the villain of the story to be some reckless splurge I'd conveniently forgotten about. Instead, I found subscriptions.
The list that broke me
Here's what's quietly bleeding my account dry every single month, in no particular order except the order in which the shame arrived: 2TB of Google cloud storage I forgot I upgraded to. My Claude subscription. A Duolingo family pack for a language I have, at best, a passing relationship with. Apple iCloud, running alongside the Google storage, because apparently I trust neither company enough to commit. Spotify family. Netflix. Wolt+. Canva.
None of these, on their own, felt like a decision. That's the whole trick, isn't it? Nobody sits down and consciously chooses eight recurring payments. They just accumulate, one free trial and one "I'll cancel it later" at a time, until one day you're doing the maths and realising you said no to the COS 60% sale and to the Margiela Tabi ballerinas I have been dreaming about for actual months, and yet somehow found room in the budget for a language app I open twice a year out of guilt.
Apparently it's not just me
Small comfort, but comfort nonetheless: it turns out this isn't a personal failing so much as a fully documented global phenomenon. According to research from Mastercard and FT Strategies, based on a 2025 survey of more than 2,000 US consumers, this exact pattern is happening everywhere. 44% of US consumers spent more on subscriptions in 2025 than the year before, with average annual subscription spend climbing to $1,887, up from $1,416 in 2024. Meanwhile, monthly churn for subscription businesses has risen to 20%, and over half of subscription businesses admit that at least 10% of their subscribers are inactive, still paying for something they've stopped using. Sound familiar.
Globally, 31% of consumers admit to cancelling and reactivating the same subscriptions repeatedly, chasing flexibility they were never actually offered in the first place. And it's not always deliberate self-sabotage either: 25% of consumers globally have blocked a payment they mistakenly believed was fraudulent, and 29% have disputed a recurring charge for the same reason, usually because they'd forgotten about a free trial or a service they no longer use. Among Gen Z, that jumps to 37%. I would like to formally apologise to my bank for every panicked "wait, what is this charge" moment that was, in fact, just Canva.
Here's the detail that stung the most: most of us would simply stay subscribed if the price were fair. Two-thirds of people who cancelled a subscription said they would likely have stayed if offered a lower price, and nearly half would have accepted a cheaper, stripped-down version instead of leaving entirely. On the flip side, 74% say they're more likely to sign up in the first place when cancellation looks easy, and 70% say they're more likely to resubscribe later for the same reason. It's not that we hate the products. It's that nobody ever asks us what we'd actually be willing to pay before quietly hoping we won't notice the renewal. 64% of consumers say they'd view a brand more positively simply for making it easy to pause or cancel a subscription, which tells you everything about how low that bar currently sits.
The Revolut escape hatch
The one thing keeping my financial self-respect intact is that Revolut lets me block a payment rather than go through whatever maze of menus, "are you sure," and guilt-trip retention offers most of these companies bury the actual cancel button under. Apparently I'm not alone there either: half of Gen Z now cancel subscriptions this way, by blocking the payment rather than formally cancelling it, simply because it's faster than fighting a company for the privilege of leaving. Globally, 77% of consumers say they want to see and manage all their subscriptions from inside their banking app, and 39% would even consider switching banks just to get that feature. Make of that what you will about how much we currently trust the companies we're paying monthly.
Why does it have to be this difficult. That's not a question. I know why. I just refuse to accept it.
