This week a lot of us are getting a slightly bigger charge from Peacock. The streamer announced in August that every plan was going up: Select from $7.99 to $8.99 a month, Premium from $10.99 to $12.99, and the ad-free Premium Plus from $16.99 to $19.99. New subscribers paid the higher price right away, and existing ones see it on their first bill after September 17. I noticed it because I’d forgotten I was still paying for Premium Plus, months after the one show I signed up for ended. That’s what sent me into a full subscription audit, and it’s the best hour I’ve spent on money this year. My take: the price hikes matter less than the subscriptions you’ve stopped seeing.
You’re probably spending more than you think
In a 2022 survey, C+R Research asked people to guess what they spent each month on subscriptions, then had them add up their actual charges. The average guess was $86. The real number was $219. That’s a gap of $133 a month, or nearly $1,600 a year, in charges people had simply stopped noticing.
That blind spot makes sense once you think about how these services are built. Free trials roll into paid plans. Annual renewals come once a year, long after you’ve forgotten signing up. Small charges hide in a credit card statement next to groceries and gas. And each price increase is small enough that it rarely triggers a second look. A dollar here and three dollars there feels like nothing until you add them together.
Canceling is still harder than signing up
I’d love to tell you federal rules have fixed this, but it’s messier than that. The FTC finalized its “click to cancel” rule in October 2024, which would have required companies to make canceling as easy as signing up. In July 2025, days before key parts of it were set to take effect, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the rule on procedural grounds. In January of this year, the FTC sent a draft advance notice of proposed rulemaking on negative option plans to the White House budget office to restart the process, which could take a long time.
The FTC still enforces existing law in the meantime. In September 2025, it announced a $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon over allegations that Prime enrollment and cancellation flows were designed to trap people, including $1.5 billion set aside for customer refunds. A settlement that size gives you a sense of how much money is made from people who meant to cancel and didn’t. Until a new rule exists, the easiest cancel flow is still the one you start yourself.
How to run a subscription audit in one evening
Here’s the method I used. Pull up the last three months of statements for every card and bank account you use, plus the subscriptions screens in your iPhone or Google Play settings, your PayPal account, and your Amazon memberships page. Three months matters, because quarterly charges won’t show up in a single statement.
Make one running note on your phone with each service, what it costs, how often it bills, and when you last used it. Then sort each into one of three piles. Keep is for things you use every week. Rotate is for the streaming services you love but only watch in bursts. Cancel is everything you hesitated over for more than two seconds.
For the cancel pile, do it that night, while you’re annoyed. For annual plans you want to drop, cancel now and let the plan run out, so you don’t forget again eleven months from now. And for anything you want to try again later, set a reminder in your calendar the day before the next free trial would convert.
The rotation math on one streaming service
Rotation is where the real savings hide, and here’s the arithmetic on just one service. Say you keep Peacock Premium Plus all year at the new $19.99. That’s $19.99 times 12, or $239.88.
Now say what you actually watch on it lines up with three months of the year, like a show’s new season and a big sports event. Subscribe for those three months only and you pay $19.99 times 3, which is $59.97. The difference is $179.91 a year, from one app, without giving up anything you were really watching.
Do the same with a second streamer and you’re near $360. Line them up so only one is active at a time and you never pay for two services you’re too busy to watch. Against that $133 monthly gap from the C+R survey, rotation alone won’t close it, but adding a few straight cancellations usually does.
While you’re in there, look for the subscriptions you’re paying for twice. Phone carriers, internet providers, and credit cards often bundle a streaming service or cloud storage into a plan you already have, and it’s easy to end up paying for the same app directly too. I found I was paying for extra phone storage on my own account and on our family plan, which was a few dollars a month for nothing. Check the perks pages for your phone plan and your main credit card before you decide what to keep.
Use the calendar, not willpower
What keeps this from being a once-a-year purge is a reminder system. I put the renewal date of every annual plan in my calendar the week before it bills. I also set a recurring reminder for the first of every quarter that just says “subscriptions,” and it takes me ten minutes now. If you’ve done a no-spend month, this is the same muscle: look at what’s leaving your account automatically and decide whether you’d buy it again today.
One more trick that helps: use one card for subscriptions only. When every recurring charge lands in one place, the statement becomes your audit. You’ll spot a new price the first month it appears instead of the sixth.
Do it before holiday spending starts
September is a good time for this because it’s quiet before the gift buying and travel booking of the next three months. Every dollar of autopay you cut now is a dollar you have in December, and that’s when it’s hardest to find. If your statement shows a new, higher Peacock charge this week, start your subscription audit there, then keep going down the list. Odds are good you’ll find something else you forgot you were paying for, the way I did.