How to pay for 15 subscriptions to games and services without attracting the attention of orderlies
TL;DR: I spend 11 glasses of coffee a month on subscriptions and will share 17 ways you can save on them.
In 2024, it is difficult to avoid and not exist in the digital environment without having a single subscription. Paid, free, “I’ll try for 1 ruble and unsubscribe,” but you will still have a couple of subscriptions, at least for mobile communications, home Internet, or even housing and communal services.
Despite the title, I don’t like the subscription model and try to avoid it, which doesn’t always work out. Not always so much that I have accumulated as many as 15 subscriptions to digital services. At first glance, this sounds like “a lot” and “very expensive,” but in reality it turns out to be much cheaper than you might imagine: the three most expensive subscriptions take up 55% of the cost, so you can quickly cut costs if something happens.
A few words in defense of subscriptions
Despite all the hostility of subscriptions for the user, I give them their due as a means of monetizing a product. In some cases, such a payment model is justified, and a one-time fee will make the service either expensive or unprofitable:
Subscription to content: movies, books, music, which will reward authors and stimulate the development of the industry.
Software subscription: Using Adobe as an example, you can see how a small recurring fee helps develop a huge variety of professional tools.
Subscription to resources: some functions cannot be implemented on the client side due to technical limitations, for example, ChatGPT or Midjourney. This also includes renting servers or cloud storage.
Subscribe to save time. If with a subscription some task is completed faster, then it is often worth it: for example, a service for delivering ready-made meals to your home saves a lot of time on cooking.
Philosophy of approach to subscriptions
For myself, I always adhere to a simple rule: the benefits of a subscription should be significantly higher than the costs of it.
It's worth clarifying that for me the concept of “benefit” is not sound quality, unlocking features or more space in the cloud. Benefit – saving time, effort, money and negative emotions or solving a specific problem. If a product makes my life much easier or relieves me of the responsibility to make decisions (which is also important), it’s a great product.
I also measure “costs” not directly in rubles, but in working hours: this is a very cool life hack to estimate the real value of a subscription for a person.
As a result, before each subscription I ask myself philosophical questions: Is this subscription worth N hours of my working time? Am I really willing to sacrifice this time for this service? Is this solution to the problem really worth it in exchange for my time?
Having asked myself these questions, 75% of the time my answer is no. A service can be cool, fun, or even useful, but very often solving this or that problem with its help is not worth the working time that I need to give for this solution.
This life hack works very well not only for subscriptions, but also for any expenses and can “cool the dust” by giving you a good reason NOT to spend money.
It is important to correctly calculate your hourly rate for compensation: you need to divide your net profit (after taxes and various deductions) by ALL the time you spent to earn this profit: including travel time, unpaid work at home, and the like. The resulting cost per hour can be used to truly assess the value of the product or service: are you willing to burn that time to take advantage of the offer?
How do I keep track of subscriptions?
Keeping track of 15 subscriptions is a very non-trivial task. These are 3 different currencies, 5 payment methods and at least 11 people who pay for part of the subscriptions along with you – they need to be reminded about the charge, collect the money and transfer it to the payment method.
To help manage all this chaos of payments, I sort them by categories and payment methods:
Categories help you avoid subscribing to two similar subscriptions (online cinemas) or get rid of unnecessary subscriptions if their total cost exceeds a critical value. I divide them into services (mobile communications), content (cinema), bonuses (subscription to a loyalty program), patronage (when you support content authors), software and entertainment (subscriptions and payments in games).
Separation by payment methods helps to understand which subscriptions will stop working if the payment method “falls off,” which is important for foreign cards.
I try to optimize my expenses so that spending on subscriptions does not exceed reasonable limits: for me, the psychological limit for spending is 4-5 hours of working time to compensate for the average monthly expenses on subscriptions. Now I manage to spend a little more than 2 hours.
About active subscriptions
iCloud+ 50 Gb
59₽ monthly. I only use this place for iCloud Photos, to sync photos between Apple devices and make backups. In my opinion, this is the best application for organizing a family photo archive and creating a collection of memories: there is grouping by locations, faces, and you can also group albums into folders, building a convenient structure.
April – Pharmacy Club
998₽ every 16 months (~62₽ monthly). This is a very strange concept of a pharmacy that I have come across for the first time, where without a paid subscription the prices for all goods are inflated, but with it the prices become slightly lower than in other pharmacies. Yes, medications are those things that you always need to look for and compare in different places, but after searching and looking, it often turns out to be cheaper in April. One purchase of medications pays for the cost of a subscription for several months.
Domain for mail
$10 annually (~79₽ monthly). I use my own domain for mail: for each service I have my own unique address in the form service@mydomain.com, and all letters to such addresses arrive in one mailbox. When a chain letter “you won the lottery” or something similar arrives at servicename@mydomain.com, I understand where the leak occurred, block the address and change it in the service, and sometimes even stop using it altogether. This helps track companies that are skimping on protecting user data, as well as keeping your inbox free of spam even after 10 years.
Service “Package”
990₽ annually (~83₽ monthly). The service provides increased cashback with candy wrappers in chain stores, as well as 5 more free deliveries and a small discount every month. Pays for itself within 2-3 months, because delivery costs 100₽.
TickTick Premium
₴740 annually (~144₽ monthly). Due to my inquisitiveness, I have been trying for a long time and persistently to switch from this task manager to some other one, but every time I am convinced how inconvenient the other solutions are for me. In general, I fit within the free limits, but still sign up for a premium for two reasons: I want to support the developers and I need a calendar view function for the task list, which is not available in this form in any other service.
Telegram Premium
1990₽ annually (~166₽ monthly). Despite the fact that Telegram contains “a lot” of different functions in its premium subscription, I find only two useful: turning off ads and transcribing voice messages. I use the latter very often, so paying 12 minutes of working time per month for this feature will save much more time listening to voice messages.
Mobile communications
190₽ every 30 days (~193₽ monthly). I have a closed tariff with unlimited Internet and many minutes, which was once offered to me by an operator so that I would not go to another company. In general, it is very cheap and quite profitable: now similar tariffs cost several times more.
Boosty
200₽ monthly. I really like one author who draws small comics on Telegram, and for a small fee you can see 2 times more materials. This subscription is very variable and not very obligatory, in general, it’s just my wish.
Mega Pro I – 2 TB
₴1670 annually (~329₽ monthly). I really like how this cloud combines privacy and functionality at the same time, and also how the service works with bug reports and problem solving. Moreover, recently it has been cheaper than some other solutions (Google Drive, iCloud Drive and all sorts of Dropbox). Basically, I pay for 2 TB and put all my useful files there. If I have ever saved some useful file, I always have it on Mega.
Blessing of the Hollow Moon
449₽ every 30 days (~455₽ monthly). For those who don't know, this is a manually renewed subscription for Genshin Impact that gives a small reward for logging into the game every day. Buying currency through a subscription is 6 times cheaper than buying the same amount, but one-time through the in-game store. miHoYo definitely know how to increase retention in their products: the player pays a pretty penny, gets a sliver of resources, and the company gets monstrous metrics.
About free subscriptions
Some subscriptions cost me free due to circumstances (and I also don’t feel the need to pay for them because they’re not worth it), so I’ve put them in a separate category.
Kaspersky: Who Calls
1190₽ annually (~99₽ monthly). It seems like the perfect app for blocking spam calls: they are blocked at the system level and do not appear in the call list at all. I haven’t encountered any false positives when someone didn’t get through to me. The advantage is that if you just need to block all spam, you can do without a subscription, and the paid version shows which organization you were called from, and also allows you to “break through” the number inside the application in spam databases.
Yandex.Plus
3490₽ annually (~292₽ monthly). For some, this is a really cool bundle where there are movies, books and music, as well as a bunch of other junk, but I don’t use it much. The only 2 services that I use are Music (My Wave is a very cool service that surpasses all others in the quality of recommendations) and Bookmate for reading some books (since they handed it to me).
In my personal opinion, the subscription is not worth the money, and all of Yandex is full of advertising. Taking into account the shrinking music library and Bookmate’s very modest catalogue, 300₽ for such content is very expensive.
1Password for Family
$59.85 annually (~474₽ monthly). For me, this is one of the most convenient solutions on the market: advanced functionality in the form of storage and labels, cool design and excellent work on all platforms. I tested and looked at all the alternatives, they are all inferior in design and convenience, and also partially inferior in functionality.
Subscriptions that I have declined to renew
MyBook Premium
1490₽ annually (~124₽ monthly). It seems that I fell for the bait of self-deception when I bought this subscription and flattered myself that it would encourage me to read more. Overall, this subscription is beneficial and convenient if you read or listen to at least one book a month, but in 2 years of subscription I read a little less than 5 books. We will consider that we supported the development of the service!
Tinkoff Pro
1990₽ annually (~166₽ monthly). I originally took this subscription for two reasons: I needed notifications for cards, and I also wanted a higher rate on my savings account. I wanted to compensate myself with a bonus through an increased cashback on cinemas for the entire cost of the subscription, but everything didn’t go according to plan after a month:
The interest rate even with a subscription is ridiculous: 11% per annum, when in other banks the same, or even higher, but already free;
Notifications work, but they turned out to be a little useless: I caught myself thinking that they do not bring practical benefit. I carefully monitor my spending and expenses, and if I lose my card, they won’t be able to withdraw all the money due to the established limits.
Cashback for cinemas barely covers the service fee. Real cashback is 3-4%. Moreover, after two tickets for 600 rubles, Tinkoff unilaterally reduced my cashback from 15% to 12%, explaining this by the fact that they have “individual conditions for each client.” Now cashback reduces the service fee to zero.
Summary statistics
The final statistics are interesting:
I spend 1780₽ on all 13 active subscriptions. On average, one subscription costs 136 rubles, which is not that expensive. I can cut my costs by more than half by unsubscribing from just three services: Hollow Moon Blessing, Mega Cloud, and Boosty.
I divide these 13 subscriptions into 6 different categories and they have 5 different payment methods. The largest share is in the “service” category – almost 38% of all spending, followed by “entertainment” – 25%.
31% of the money I spend on subscriptions is in foreign currency.
With current subscriptions until 2027, I will spend about 43,170 rubles. In general, when you look at average spending over 3 years, this figure is somewhat terrifying and makes you want to unsubscribe from all subscriptions at once. On average, over 3 years I spend 63,850 rubles on subscriptions.
I really don’t like keeping track of payments, so a couple of times a year I pay for all the subscriptions that depend only on me, en masse – for example, I pay for mobile communications once a year for 2280 rubles, and I renew the Blessing of the Hollow Moon every six months for 2694 rubles:
How to save on subscriptions
Having 15 subscriptions in 3 different currencies, willy-nilly you begin to understand all the possible ways to save on such payments. Here are 17 working methods, from obvious to unusual:
Don't subscribe. 100% savings. Find analogues in the form of other services or application modifications. If your task is trivial, and there is only subscription software around, see if it can be solved using free online tools. For example, instead of Zenmoney, you can manage your budget in Google Docs.
See all the subscription plans the service offers. Almost always, subscribing for a year is a little cheaper than renewing a monthly subscription 12 times.
Comparison of benefits across different subscription plans Find like-minded people: some subscriptions can be used together. See how much it will cost to sign up for a family subscription for several people: it usually comes out 2-5 times cheaper than paying alone. This rule is true not only for family subscriptions, but also for any others that can be divided, for example, into April Pharmacy, server, and even online cinema (although your viewing marks will be mixed)
See if there is a way to get subscription bonuses without using that subscription. For example, some cloud storage services give you permanent storage space as a bonus if you refer a friend.
Check out other payment regions. Similar to an Xbox Game Pass subscription, prices between regions can differ by 8-10 times. You can probably find a way to pay for your subscription in another region, such as through gift cards.
Look at all the platforms on which the service is presented: it may be cheaper to buy through some method. For example, a subscription to Mega Pro I for a year in rubles through the website will cost 10,000 rubles, through the App Store – 7,000 rubles, and through foreign Google Play – about 4,000 rubles for the same period.
Pay back. If your subscription includes the opportunity to get cashback or actually save money (rather than paying at average market prices instead of inflated ones), calculate how quickly and how effectively you will start saving.
Use promotional codes: sometimes, in addition to the standard “30 days free”, for some subscriptions you can find and apply promotional periods for six months or a year. For example, for some services, a new client can activate 8-9 months of subscription for free.
Find a way to get cashback for paying for subscriptions. When the App Store charged money from a bank card, this purchase was under the “Music” category. I used this often and topped up my Apple ID with 5% cashback.
Replace subscription with non-subscription: sometimes a service sells functionality not as a subscription, but as a one-time purchase. It usually costs 2 or 3 years of subscription, but in some cases it pays for itself.
Look for the opportunity to use payment cards that offer a discount. For example, 1Password used to often sell a $125 card for $100. As a result, 1 year of subscription cost $50, not $60.
If you subscribe to a Russian service, look at gift cards for this subscription for sale on marketplaces and stores like MVideo. For example, a subscription to the MyBook website costs 5,000 rubles per year, and a card in MVideo for the same period costs 1,500 rubles. In some places you can even find it for 1000₽.
Some subscriptions can be issued and used periodically, for example, a subscription for renting scooters is only valid during the warm season. By analogy, you can do the same with any other service – perhaps there is no need for an annual subscription?
I call this technique “heavy reading.” For some subscription services, for example, book services, you can sign up for a subscription when you have accumulated several desired books: you don’t have to have a subscription for the whole year – save up materials, and then read them in a month. For movie services, it may be important to buy a subscription during vacation weeks, rather than throughout the year.
Subscriptions in subscriptions as a way to save money. Some subscriptions are entire bundles of not just services, but also other subscriptions, which can save a lot of money. Among these are Gazprom Bonus or Ozon Premium.
Multiple subscriptions in one subscription Quite a lot of services provide their services at a discount for the education sector: not only for students, but also for teachers. Usually such tariffs are hidden deeper, but it’s still worth looking. You don't have to be a student yourself, just find someone with a student email address who is willing to help you.
A fun way: get a job at a company that sells subscriptions to this service. Almost always, they give their employees their subscriptions free of charge during their work (and even after dismissal too). Works at least with Tinkoff and Yandex.
In conclusion about subscriptions
Subscriptions are a way for a company to receive a constant flow of funds for the development of the service and earn money over the long term. In some cases, this is completely justified and even stimulates the entire industry, and sometimes it is a manifestation of greed.
If a subscription solves some of your problems, saves time or other resources, this may be a good solution depending on its cost. Think about how much easier your daily life will become with this service? Will it be worth the time investment?
Subscription is also a way to support not only those solutions or services that you like, but also other market players – domestic developers, startups, innovative solutions that will move the industry and maintain healthy competition.
I work as a product designer and for this article I used screenshots from my pet project Nocta Pro to track a large number of subscriptions. It's free, without ads or any in-app purchases. If you also have a lot of subscriptions or would be interested in seeing statistics on them, you can download it from Google Play.
Share your unusual subscriptions to services that solve a problem or solve a problem. Do you use any other ways to save on subscriptions?
