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Broke by Choice

Being broke is expensive. Staying broke is a decision.

Compare and Switch

The streaming stack: the bill nobody ever decided on

Nobody sits down and chooses to pay for five services. You choose once, five times, several years apart, and the total arrives on its own.

by · · 5 min read

U.S. households reported 185 dollars a year on video streaming, rentals and downloads in 2024, and another 35 on audio.[1] Those are averages across every household, including the ones who stream nothing. If you are reading this, yours is almost certainly higher, and the interesting question is by how much.

NameAmountBilling cycleUsed?

This calculation runs on our server and is not stored – neither your result nor your entry.

Never used

$300

Rarely used

$156

Often used

$336

That is 37.9% of your subscription spend on things you yourself marked “never used”.

Assumptions behind this calculation

  • What you marked as “rarely” is NOT counted as waste. Whether a rarely used subscription can go is your call.

The stack above is a made-up example, and you should replace it with yours. The structure is what matters: five charges, none of them large, arriving on five different days of the month from three different cards. The reason the total is invisible is not carelessness. It is design. No single charge is big enough to trigger a decision, and there is no month where all five land together on one screen.

For each service, one question: when did you last watch something on it? Not whether you might. Not whether there is a show you have been meaning to start. When, actually. If the answer needs a moment of thought, that is the answer.

This is not an argument for having none of them. Streaming is one of the genuinely good deals of the last twenty years and it costs a fraction of what a cable package did. The argument is against paying for five simultaneously when you watch two.

The move that works is not austerity, it is scheduling. Keep one or two running, and take the others one month at a time when there is something specific you want to see. Streaming services are month to month by design, resubscribing takes ninety seconds, and nothing is lost: your watchlist is still there when you come back.

One evening, one list

Open your card statements for the last two months and write down every recurring media charge with its date. Most people find at least one they had forgotten and one they cannot remember choosing. That list, not the total, is what changes behaviour.

What you can do about it

  1. List every recurring media charge with its date

    Two months of statements. The date matters as much as the amount, because it explains why you never see them together.

  2. Ask when you last watched, not whether you might

    A service you have been meaning to use is a service you are paying to feel prepared. That is a real feeling and an expensive one.

  3. Rotate one at a time

    Keep the ones you use weekly. Take the others for a single month when there is something specific. Resubscribing is designed to be trivial, which for once works in your favour.

  4. Kill the add-ons first

    Sports and channel add-ons attach themselves to a main subscription and renew with it. They are the least visible line and often the largest.

Frequently asked

Does cancelling and resubscribing cost me anything?

On the major services, no. There is no reconnection fee and your profile, watchlist and history are kept. The one thing to check is whether you are on a legacy price that will not be available again when you come back.

What about the bundles?

A bundle is cheaper than the parts only if you would have bought all the parts. Work out what you would pay for just the services you actually watch and compare that number, not the list price of the bundle.

Sources

  1. Consumer Expenditure Survey 2024: 185 dollars per consumer unit for video streaming, rental and downloads, 35 dollars for audio, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieved August 22, 2026.

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