Xbox Game Pass Ultimate cost $19.99 a month in September 2025, $29.99 by November, and $22.99 by the following April — three different prices in seven months, on the same tier, for the same games. If you set a reminder for "Game Pass renews at $19.99," you have been wrong for a while and probably didn't notice, because none of the three storefronts a gamer actually pays into — Steam, Xbox, PlayStation — send a receipt that looks like a bank statement line item.
That's the actual audit problem here. Not "do I have too many subscriptions," but "do I know which of these three bills me, at what rate, and what I lose the day I stop paying." Worth doing the same pass you'd run on any subscription hunt — check the billing source first, don't assume you remember the number.
Xbox Game Pass: four tiers, one bill that keeps moving
As of April 2026, Essential (the old "Game Pass Core") is $9.99/month for 50+ games, cloud gaming, and online multiplayer. Premium is $14.99/month for 200+ games and new Xbox-published titles within a year of launch. PC Game Pass is $13.99/month, cut from $16.49 that same month. Ultimate is $22.99/month — the number that moved twice: up from $19.99 to $29.99 in October 2025 (a straight 50% hike), then back down to $22.99 in April 2026, per Xbox's own announcement. Essential and Premium didn't move during either swing, but they did quietly gain unlimited cloud access that used to be Ultimate-only.
EA Play is the tier where things get confusing on a statement. It's bundled free with Ultimate and PC Game Pass — no separate line item. But EA Play can also be bought standalone through Steam, where it bills as a Steam charge, or through Origin/the EA app, where it bills as an EA charge with its own cancellation flow in the EA account. Same product, three different places it can show up on a card statement depending on where you originally clicked "subscribe." Check the actual list at account.microsoft.com/services under "Subscriptions" rather than trusting memory.
PlayStation Plus: the same tier, two different prices
Sony runs three tiers — Essential, Extra, Premium — priced monthly, quarterly, or annually, with the annual option marketed as roughly a third cheaper than paying monthly. On May 20, 2026, Essential's monthly price moved from $9.99 to $10.99 (and the three-month price from $25 to $27.99), but only for new subscribers; PlayStation's own reporting suggests people who stayed continuously subscribed before that date kept the old rate in most markets. So "the" Essential price isn't one number — it depends on your account's history, which is exactly the kind of thing an audit is supposed to catch rather than assume.
Annual pricing across all three tiers hasn't moved since a bigger increase in September 2023, when Essential went from $59.99 to $79.99 a year and Premium from $119.99 to $159.99. Cancel from the console (Settings → Users and Accounts → Payment and Subscriptions on PS5) or from Sony's account management page, and note that cancelling doesn't cut you off immediately — benefits run through the end of the period you already paid for, with a "Reactivate" option if you change your mind before the next charge.
Steam doesn't bill you for the platform — but recurring charges still hide there
The overwhelming majority of what you buy on Steam is a one-time, permanent-license purchase — the platform itself has no subscription fee. But Steam does support recurring, subscription-billed products from specific publishers — Valve's own example is EA Play and The Elder Scrolls Online: Plus Membership, described on Steam's help page as "billed on a recurring basis." If you bought EA Play through Steam instead of through EA directly, it's managed from Account Details → Recurring Subscriptions, not from your EA account, and there are no refunds on already-charged subscription periods — only cancellation of the next one. Humble Choice is a separate trap: it looks Steam-adjacent because the keys redeem on Steam, but it bills through Humble Bundle and has to be cancelled there.
This is the practical version of the carrier-billing problem in a different costume — the charge shows up under whichever storefront processed it, not under the brand you'd expect, so cancelling in the wrong place just means you get charged again next month.
What you lose — and keep — when you cancel
Xbox: cancel or let Game Pass lapse, and every Game Pass title stops launching, including ones already downloaded, because the game checks for a valid license each time it opens. Your save data and achievements aren't deleted — they stay in the cloud and on the console — but you can't reach them without an active subscription or an outright purchase of that game. If you need a save back later, Xbox Support has a specific "Cloud Saves" escalation path under Gaming and Apps.
PlayStation: Sony is blunter about it. Its own support page states that once PlayStation Plus ends, "content you previously downloaded at no cost as part of the subscription (such as monthly games) will no longer be available." Anything you bought outright at a member discount stays yours permanently, and redeemed cosmetics stick around too — it's specifically the free monthly claims and cloud storage that go away with the subscription.
None of the three platforms will remind you before the charge lands — that part's on you. I keep the renewal dates for all three in Subnesio next to the rest of my recurring payments, mostly because "check three separate account pages by hand every month" isn't a system, it's a chore I'll eventually skip.
P.S. If you only do one thing after reading this: open account.microsoft.com/services and the Steam Recurring Subscriptions page today, not on renewal day.
