How much am I actually paying for software I barely use?

Subscriptions are designed to be easy to start and easy to forget. A tool you signed up for during a busy week, a trial that quietly became a paid plan, a per-seat licence for people who left months ago. None of it feels like much on its own. Totalled up, it often is. This is how to find it.

Step by step

1. Pull every recurring charge into one listGo through your business card and bank statements for the last three months and write down every software charge you find. Do not rely on memory: the whole point is that some of these are invisible to you. Include the annual ones too, which hide because they only bill once a year. Check any app stores and payment services as well, since some tools bill through those. The goal is a single, complete list of everything you pay for.
2. Note what each tool does and who uses itBeside each charge, write in plain words what the tool is for and who on your team actually uses it. You will find duplicates, two tools doing nearly the same job, and orphans, tools nobody can quite explain. You will also find per-seat licences for people who have left. This column is where the waste starts to reveal itself, because a cost with no clear owner or purpose is usually a cost you can cut. Writing the purpose in plain words is more revealing than it sounds: if you cannot explain in a short sentence what a tool is for and who relies on it, that difficulty is itself a finding. Tools that resist a clear description are often the ones adopted in a hurry, kept out of inertia, or duplicating something you already have under another name, and they are exactly the candidates a good audit is meant to surface.
3. Rate how often you truly use each oneMark each tool as daily, weekly, monthly, rarely, or never. Be honest, not aspirational: rate how you actually use it, not how you meant to. The rarely and never rows are your immediate savings. A tool you touch once a quarter almost never justifies a monthly fee, and a tool you never open is pure leakage. This rating turns a vague sense of too many tools into a clear, ranked list. Be especially wary of the tools you rate as rarely used but feel reluctant to cancel: that reluctance is often habit rather than need, and naming how little you actually use something is the first honest step towards letting it go. Equally, flag the rare exception, a tool you touch once a year but genuinely depend on when you do, so you do not cut something critical simply because it is used infrequently.
4. Annualise every costMultiply each monthly charge by twelve to see its true yearly weight, and add the annual ones as they are. A tool at a modest monthly price can look trivial and cost a meaningful sum across a year. Seeing the annual figure, not the monthly one, is what makes the waste feel real. Total the whole list, then total just the rarely and never rows: that second number is money you could stop spending almost immediately. Seeing both totals side by side is the moment the exercise pays off, because the gap between what you spend and what you actually use, laid out as a single yearly figure, is usually larger and more motivating than any vague sense that you were paying for too much. That number is the reward for the hour you spent, and it recurs every year you keep the stack lean.
5. Decide: cancel, consolidate, or keepWork down the list and put each tool in one of three buckets. Cancel the ones you do not use. Consolidate the overlapping ones into whichever does the job best, or into a single custom tool if several near-duplicates are each charging you. Keep the ones that earn their place. This exercise costs you an hour and often finds savings that repeat every month for as long as you run the business, which is the best kind of saving there is.
6. Cancel carefully and keep watchingWhen you cancel, do it cleanly: export anything you might need first, confirm nothing depends on the tool before you switch it off, and check the charge actually stops on the next statement, because cancellations sometimes fail quietly and keep billing. Some tools also lock you into an annual term, so note when each one can be cancelled without penalty rather than assuming you can leave any time. Then set a reminder to repeat this whole review in a year, because subscriptions regrow the moment you stop watching them. A single audit fixes today; the habit of auditing keeps the waste from quietly building back up. The businesses that stay lean are not the ones that clean up once, but the ones that make this a short, regular check rather than a rare, heroic effort.
7. Look for patterns, not just single culpritsOnce you have the full list in front of you, step back and read it for shape rather than picking off individual charges. Do several tools cluster around the same job, hinting that one better tool or a single custom system could replace the lot. Does a large share of the total come from per-seat licences that will only grow as you hire. Are there whole categories, marketing tools, say, or project trackers, where you have quietly accumulated three overlapping subscriptions nobody chose deliberately. Seeing these patterns matters because the biggest savings often come not from cancelling one forgotten tool but from noticing that a group of them together points to a structural problem worth solving properly. A single audit that only removes obvious dead weight is worth doing; one that also reveals where your spending is concentrated and why is worth far more, because it tells you not just what to cancel today but where your software costs are heading and which parts of the stack deserve a harder look.