I canceled all subscriptions to apps under $10 and barely miss most of them.

I’m no longer the kind of person who happily signs up for a new subscription every time I try cool new software. Actually, it’s quite the opposite: if I really like the product, I’ll try to take the free trial as far as possible and usually settle for whatever the free tier has to offer after that. After having multiple Adobe subscriptions for so longI know how quickly individual plans for multiple tools add up, and before you know it, you’re paying a huge sum for a stack of tools you don’t even necessarily need every day.

So whenever I subscribe to a service or product, it’s either because I can’t complete a specific task without it, or it has to be so interesting that I can’t resist trying the premium version.. There have been a couple of these tools that have come in and out of my rotation over the last few years, and I’ve already abandoned most of them because they served their purpose or because the price wasn’t worth it.

“Small” Subscriptions Add Up Quickly

One $10 subscription is fine, but ten $10 subscriptions are expensive

A single $10 subscription doesn’t seem like a big deal, and it really isn’t. Most apps are priced that way on purpose – it’s a relatively small monthly fee to take advantage of the pro features, so it’s easy to justify paying. The problem starts when you apply the same logic to all the other tools in your stack. Before long, you have a dozen small subscriptions continually renewing in the background and you’re paying over $100 a month for… extra AI features, better exporting, and some extra storage you don’t need?

I can’t help but make comparisons to the buy now, pay later crisis my generation finds itself in. It’s the same concept and psychology of breaking down payments into small chunks to justify the cost (and still own nothing). The thing is, you’ll still get a big bill at the end of the month. And unless you legitimately need it for work or school, I just don’t see the need for a couple of pro features that you can probably get elsewhere for completely free.

The subscriptions I dropped

And what I’m using instead

Most of my subscriptions were for design toolssince that is my main domain, as well as some productivity and artificial intelligence tools. This included tools from Adobe, Canva, Picsart, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Notion, AFFiNE, Readwise, and a couple more. Not all of them are under $10, but it follows the same idea of ​​one cheap subscription on top of another, building up to a big bill at the end. I didn’t have all of my subscriptions long-term, many were just to try out the pro features, but I definitely kept some of them for too long.

After canceling my Adobe plans, I realized I was paying for features that were now available for me for free. A lot of the things I was paying for weren’t even necessary, especially considering I’m not a professional designer. There are many free, freemium, and open source creativity and productivity apps that fill the gaps of premium subscription-based software. Another option is to simply rotate subscriptions as you need them or make the most of free trials.

Nowadays, I keep my productivity and creative editing toolkits pretty flexible, as many new apps come in and out of my rotation, but I only stick with a handful of tools at any given time…

• Master in Law – My local LLM and the free version of Claude Desktop have me covered.

• Other AI tools: NotebookLM and Gistr allow me to interact with my documents and sources.

• PKM – AFFiNE (the free tier).

• Note-taking: Windows Notepad and Obsidian have more than enough formatting options.

• Image editing: Affinity and Photopea are practically mirrors of Photoshop.

• Design: Affinity, Penpot, and Figma handle frameworks, shapes, components, and prototypes for free.

• Videos: Kdenlive and Shotcut also allow me to edit motion graphics and VFX.

• File Sync and Transfer: Free Google Drive is more than enough for me and Snapdrop is very convenient.

How much money did this save me?

And is there any subscription worth its price?

If I hadn’t canceled my Adobe subscriptions over a year ago, I would have already lost at least $200, which is even more if you adjust my currency. If you had continued paying for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Notion and Picsart as well, that number would have tripled. Roughly, I’ve saved about $780 by not continuing any subscriptions over the last year. Some of them are as low as $5 per month, which shows how quickly they add up.

The only subscription I consider worth getting is one that is necessary for school, work, and in some cases, sanity. As I progress in my design work, I’ll probably pay for Figma Pro and potentially go back to Adobe. Coders will benefit from paying for Claude Code. Businesses will benefit from an n8n subscription for automation. And if you work with large batches of files, it justifies paying for more cloud storage. Currently, the only app subscription I have is YouTube Premium, because I need it for my coursework and the ads have gotten out of hand.

Pay for less and use more

Canceling these subscriptions ended up being less dramatic than I expected. Most of the tools I left behind were nice to have, but they weren’t so essential once I saw how I was actually using them. In many cases, the free tiers were already good enough and open source alternatives have come a long way in terms of power and modernized interfaces.

I don’t think subscriptions are always a bad idea. But I do implore people to be careful with the “It’s only $7 a month,” because that quickly turns into $700 a year for a full stack of apps.