The Best Subscription Services Actually Worth Paying For

I did something terrifying last month. I pulled up my bank statement, searched for every recurring charge, and made a spreadsheet. Not because I'm organized -- I'm genuinely not -- but because I realized I had no idea how much money was quietly flowing out of my account every month to services I may or may not actually use.

The total came to $387 per month. Three hundred and eighty-seven dollars. In subscriptions. That's$4,644 a year. I could buy a used car with that. A decent one. I could fly to Europe. I could fill a swimming pool with quarters and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck, and that would be a better use of money than whatever I was paying $9.99/month for to a meditation app I opened twice in November.

I went through every single one, evaluated whether it genuinely added value to my life, and ended up cutting eleven subscriptions and keeping eight. The aftermath has been an important part of actually sticking to a budget without feeling deprived.

Here's my honest tier list of subscriptions that earn their keep and the ones that are basically pickpocketing you with your permission.

Tier One: Worth Every Penny

A music streaming service (Spotify or Apple Music) -- about $11/month. This one's easy. Having access to essentially every song ever recorded, on demand, with no ads, for the price of a single drink at a bar is one of the best deals in modern life. I use Spotify roughly six hours a day. That's between commuting, working, cooking, running, and falling asleep to ambient noise that sounds like a whale having a spa day. Per hour of use, it costs me fractions of a cent. If you told me music streaming was going away tomorrow, I would legitimately panic.

Pick one. You don't need both. Spotify has better discovery algorithms and podcasts. Apple Music has slightly better sound quality and integrates perfectly with the Apple ecosystem. They're both excellent. Just don't be the guy paying for Spotify, Apple Music, AND Tidal because you're "an audiophile." You're not. You're listening to the same Drake album on three different apps.

**A cloud storage service (iCloud, Google One, or similar) -- $3-10/month.** I ignored this one for years and kept getting the "Your iCloud storage is full" notification like it was a gentle suggestion rather than a warning that my entire digital life was one dropped phone away from vanishing. The$2.99/month for 200GB of iCloud storage means my photos, documents, and everything important automatically backs up without me thinking about it.

When my phone took an unplanned swim in a friend's pool last summer, I lost zero data. Zero. I walked into the Apple Store, set up my new phone, and everything was just there. That peace of mind is worth more than three dollars a month. It's worth more than most things I spend money on, honestly.

**A password manager (1Password or Bitwarden) -- $3-5/month.** If you're still using the same password for everything -- and statistically, there's a good chance you are -- a password manager is the subscription that will save you from the most real-world damage. 1Password generates unique, complex passwords for every account, stores them securely, and autofills them so you never have to remember anything. Before I got one, I had exactly three passwords that I rotated across maybe 200 accounts. It's a miracle I wasn't hacked weekly. Bitwarden does the same thing for free with a paid tier around$10/year if you want premium features. Either way, get one.

Tier Two: Depends on Your Situation

**Amazon Prime -- about $15/month.** I go back and forth on this one annually. The two-day shipping alone saves me enough trips to the store and enough impulse buys at those stores (where I always leave with$60 worth of stuff I didn't need) that it probably pays for itself. Add in Prime Video (which has quietly become one of the better streaming libraries), the photo storage, and the occasional deal on Prime Day, and it justifies its existence. Barely. It's on the bubble every year, but it survives the annual audit every time.

A streaming service (but pick ONE or TWO, max). This is where I've seen the most subscription fatigue set in. Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Apple TV+ -- if you're paying for all of them, you're spending $80-100/month on TV. That's cable prices. We've invented cable again, except worse, because now you also have to remember seven different passwords.

The play is to have one or two at a time and rotate. Watch everything you want on Netflix for two months. Cancel. Pick up HBO Max for the new season of whatever everyone's talking about. Cancel. These services make it incredibly easy to resubscribe precisely because they know people do this. There's no penalty. No long-term contract. No guilt trip from a retention specialist.

Right now, I'm paying for Netflix (because my family shares an account, so my portion is basically $5) and Apple TV+ (because it's$10 and the quality-to-quantity ratio is absurd -- less content, but almost everything they make is genuinely good). When a new season of something drops on HBO, I'll subscribe for a month, binge it, and cancel. This strategy saves me about $50/month compared to subscribing to everything simultaneously.

**A fitness app or service -- $10-30/month.** Apple Fitness+, Peloton app, WHOOP, or whatever your flavor is. Whether this is worth it depends entirely on one thing: do you actually use it? I pay for the Peloton app (no bike, just the app for running and strength classes) and I use it four to five times a week. At$13/month, that's about $0.65 per workout. Cheaper than a gym and I don't have to put on pants.

But I also had a ClassPass membership for six months where I went to exactly four classes. That was $50/month for four classes. That's$75 per class. I could've hired a personal masseuse for that hourly rate. Be brutally honest with yourself about usage before committing.

**A meal kit service -- $9-12 per serving.** HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and their cousins occupy a weird space. On one hand, they're significantly more expensive than buying groceries yourself. On the other, they eliminate the single biggest barrier to cooking at home: figuring out what to make and buying the right stuff. For me, a meal kit three nights a week was the gateway to actually cooking regularly instead of ordering DoorDash every night at$25 per meal. The math actually worked out in my favor because the alternative wasn't "cooking from scratch" -- it was "paying a delivery driver to bring me mediocre pad thai."

I used HelloFresh for about six months, learned a bunch of recipes and techniques, and then cancelled because I'd graduated to cooking on my own. Which is probably the ideal use case -- use it as training wheels, then take them off.

Tier Three: You Should Probably Cancel These

Premium versions of free apps. I was paying for premium Duolingo ($14/month) to learn Spanish. In ten months, I learned to say "Where is the library?" and "My cat is very fat." Those are real sentences I can construct in Spanish, and they cost me$140 total. Free Duolingo does basically the same thing with ads. The premium version just removes the guilt-tripping owl's interruptions, which, while annoying, are not worth $168 a year.

Same goes for most premium app upgrades. Free Spotify with ads? Annoying but functional if you're broke. Free meditation apps? They work fine. Free versions of productivity tools? Usually sufficient unless you have very specific professional needs. Before paying for premium anything, ask yourself: "What specifically am I getting for this money that the free version doesn't provide?" If the answer is "no ads" and you can tolerate ads, save your money.

Subscription boxes. I have tried many. A coffee subscription (okay), a snack box (weird stuff I didn't want), a grooming box (too much beard oil, not enough everything else), and briefly, a hot sauce subscription (genuinely fun but my digestive system filed for divorce after month three). The problem with subscription boxes is that they're exciting for two months and then become a chore. You end up with a backlog of products you didn't choose and don't particularly want, cluttering your apartment like gifts from a well-meaning but confused aunt.

The exception is if the subscription replaces something you'd buy anyway. I subscribe to a coffee roaster that sends me a bag every two weeks. I drink a bag of coffee every two weeks. It's not a subscription box -- it's just automated shopping. That's fine. That's great, even.

Extended warranties and protection plans. AppleCare, Best Buy's Geek Squad protection, the extended warranty on your TV -- these are all subscription-adjacent products designed to exploit your fear of things breaking. Statistically, the vast majority of people pay more in warranty costs than they'd ever pay in repairs. The companies selling these plans have done the math. They are profitable for a reason, and that reason is that you probably won't need them.

The exception: AppleCare on a laptop if you're clumsy. I've cracked two MacBook screens and AppleCare saved me about $900 total. But on phones, TVs, and most other electronics? Just put the warranty money into a savings account and use it for repairs if and when they happen. You'll almost certainly come out ahead.

The Audit You Need to Do Right Now

Open your bank statement. Right now. I'm serious. Search for recurring charges. Make a list. For each one, ask yourself three questions:

When was the last time I actually used this? If the answer is "I don't remember," cancel it. You can always resubscribe later if you miss it. You won't miss it.

If I didn't already have this, would I sign up for it today at this price? This question cuts through the inertia bias that keeps us subscribed to things out of habit rather than value.

What's my per-use cost? Divide the monthly fee by how often you actually use it. Spotify at $11/month used daily? Pennies per use. Brilliant. A gym membership at$50/month that you visit twice? $25 per visit. You'd be better off paying for day passes.

The subscription economy is designed to be invisible. Small charges, automatic renewals, just enough value to avoid triggering active cancellation. The companies know that most people will pay $10/month for years for something they use once a quarter because the friction of cancelling exceeds the pain of paying. Don't be that guy.

I cut $189/month in subscriptions I wasn't really using. That's$2,268 a year back in my pocket. I didn't feel any loss of quality in my life. Not even a little. I just had more money, which I then spent on things I actually wanted, which felt significantly better than funding the continued existence of a meditation app's server farm.

Your move.