How to audit your AI subscriptions: a 30-minute checklist

Most people underestimate their AI spend by roughly half, for a boring reason: the charges are small, monthly, and spread across three payment methods. The fix is equally boring and takes about thirty minutes. Here is the checklist.

Step 1 — Find everything (10 minutes)

Search your email over the last twelve months for the receipt vocabulary: receipt, invoice, your subscription, payment to, renews on. Then cross-check three places email will miss:

• PayPal's recurring-payments screen, which lists every active billing agreement.
• Your card statement, filtered to the same merchant appearing monthly.
• App-store subscriptions on iOS and Android, which never touch your email inbox.

Write each one down with its price and billing period. Annual plans are the ones people miss, because they appear once and then hide for eleven months. Normalise everything to a monthly figure before you total it.

Step 2 — Score each tool on use, not on feelings (5 minutes)

Next to each line, write how many times you opened it in the last two weeks. Not how useful it is in principle — how many times you opened it. Anything at zero or one is a candidate immediately.

Step 3 — Find the overlaps (5 minutes)

Group the list by job rather than by brand: chat, research, images, writing, notes, planning. Almost every stack has two tools doing the same job — typically two chat subscriptions kept as a hedge on model quality, or a general tool and a specialist one that has quietly converged.

Two chat subscriptions is the most expensive habit in the category, and there is now a cheaper way to hedge: one subscription that routes across vendors and can run the same prompt through two models side by side.

Step 4 — Cancel in the right order (5 minutes)

• Export first, always. Before you touch the cancel button, take the export. Check the format is Markdown, JSON or CSV — something you can actually re-import. A PDF is not a backup.
• Cancel at period end, not immediately. You have paid for the remaining days; most products keep you active until the renewal date.
• Lowest use-to-price ratio first. Not the most expensive — the worst value.
• Screenshot the confirmation. Disputed renewals are much easier to win with one.

Step 5 — Consolidate reversibly (5 minutes)

If you are replacing several tools with a bundle, run the replacement in parallel for one billing cycle before cancelling the originals. It costs one extra month and makes the whole migration reversible — which is the difference between a decision and a gamble.

Aurora exists for the consolidation end of this: one $19.99/month plan covering multi-model chat, image and video generation, notes with semantic search, and task planning, with a free tier that unlocks all eight modules so the parallel month can cost nothing. Full export to Markdown and JSON is available on every plan, including Free — test the export before you commit, not after.

Keep it from growing back

• Put every renewal date in a calendar, one week ahead of the charge.
• Adopt a one-in-one-out rule for new AI tools.
• Re-run this audit twice a year. It takes thirty minutes and it never returns nothing.

Aurora's Finance module does the tracking part in-product: add subscriptions in any currency, see a normalised monthly total, and get an AI pass over the list flagging redundant and unused entries. It is a tracker you maintain, not a bank connection — it cannot see your accounts or cancel anything for you.