Disney+'s ad-free plan jumped from $18.99 to $21.49 a month on September 23, 2026 — the sixth price increase since the service launched at $6.99 in 2019, a cumulative 207% rise (Forbes ran the math the week it landed). Nobody sent you a breakdown of those six increases, and I hadn't added them up myself until the sixth one did the math for me. You saw one new number on one statement, filed it under "prices go up, what can you do," and moved on — which is exactly the reaction a monthly glance at your subscription list produces, and exactly the reaction a deeper, twice-a-year pass is built to interrupt.
Thirty minutes, three passes
If you already run a monthly check-in — the kind that catches a forgotten trial or a new signup — this sits on top of it twice a year, not instead of it. Three timed blocks:
- Ten minutes on price creep: compare every subscription's current price against what you remember paying six months ago.
- Ten minutes on annual renewals: flag anything billed yearly that lands in the next six months.
- Ten minutes on keep-or-kill: score only what the first two passes flagged, not your whole list.
Thirty minutes, and the third pass stays short precisely because it only touches the subscriptions the first two already singled out.
Why six months catches what a month never will
Monthly check-ins are good at catching things that change in a month — a new signup, a trial that silently converted. They're bad at catching a price that moved a dollar at a time, three separate occasions, each too small on its own to trigger an "is this still worth it" moment. 2026 supplied no shortage of examples. Netflix raised all three tiers on March 26 — that one's dissected in detail in the monthly ritual post — and Spotify followed in February (Premium Individual $11.99 to $12.99), Paramount+ in January (Essential $7.99 to $8.99), Apple TV in August ($12.99 to $14.99), and YouTube Premium moved its individual plan to $15.99. None arrived with a dramatic announcement — I missed the Spotify increase myself until I went back through statements for this piece, and that's not a confession so much as the entire argument: each one, alone, is small enough to not register as a cancel decision — which is exactly why a once- or twice-a-year look, not a monthly one, is where the cumulative effect actually gets tallied. Even business software isn't exempt: Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index found 79% of IT leaders hit a price increase at renewal in the past year, so this isn't a consumer-only pattern — it's just more visible on a personal card statement than buried in a corporate invoice.
Flag the annual renewals before they auto-bill
The other blind spot a monthly check misses by design: a plan you're not being billed for this month. List every annual commitment — software licenses, a yearly streaming plan, a domain, a gym membership billed once a year — and write down the renewal date. Anything inside the next six months gets flagged today, not the week it bills.
This matters more than it sounds. Adobe settled a DOJ/FTC case on March 13, 2026 — $75 million to the government, $75 million in free services to affected customers — over an annual-paid-monthly plan that was easy to start and deliberately hard to leave, with a termination fee equal to 50% of the remaining year's payments buried in the terms (Engadget). Adobe's own statement called the matter one it was "pleased to resolve" without conceding wrongdoing — but the fee structure itself wasn't what the settlement disputed, only who should have disclosed it clearly. I don't think Adobe is unusual here, either — the same 50%-of-remaining-year math is sitting in the terms of plenty of annual-paid-monthly plans that have simply never been sued over it. Any annual-paid-monthly plan you're carrying can hide the same structure, and the only real defence is knowing your cancellation window before you're six months deep into the term.
A BSA consumer survey from March 2026 suggested roughly 42% of people want a renewal reminder about a month before it bills, not weekly and not the day before (that figure comes from a search excerpt of the report rather than a full read, so treat it as directional). Flagging renewals at the six-month mark gives you that month-out buffer by default, instead of leaving it to whether you happened to open an email that week.
The keep-or-kill score
Score only the subscriptions the first two passes flagged — scoring the entire list is how a 30-minute reset turns into an afternoon. I know this because the first time I tried it, I scored the whole list and gave up halfway through; the shortcut isn't laziness, it's the only version of this that survives a second attempt. Three questions, 0 to 2 points each:
- Usage — 0 if you can't remember opening it this month, 1 if it's occasional, 2 if you used it in the past week.
- Value — 0 if it's pure inertia, 1 if a cheaper or free option would do almost as well, 2 if nothing else replaces it.
- Price-to-value — 0 if a hike pushed it past what you'd pay signing up fresh today, 1 if it's fine but near your limit, 2 if you'd resubscribe at the current price without hesitating.
Add the three numbers. 0–2: cancel. 3–4: downgrade the tier, or switch to annual billing if the math holds — a typical 15–20% annual discount against the monthly price breaks even around 9 to 11 months of staying subscribed, so it only pays off if you're confident you'll keep the service that long (the full annual-vs-monthly breakdown walks through the exact thresholds). 5–6: leave it alone until the next half-year pass.
Treat a "kill" as provisional, too. A 2026 Deloitte Digital Media Trends survey found 43% of people had canceled at least one streaming service in the prior six months, and 27% of those who canceled resubscribed to the same service within six months — cancellation is often a pause, not a verdict. Score it again next cycle rather than treating today's number as final.
If you're keeping this list somewhere that already shows renewal dates and price history side by side — Subnesio or a spreadsheet, it doesn't matter which — the thirty minutes above is mostly reading, not data entry. Pick two dates six months apart that survive your calendar (the first weekend of January and July works for most people), run the three passes, and keep the monthly ritual running in between.
P.S. If something scores a clean 5 or 6 every single half-year check, that's not a reason to stop scoring it — it's the subscription doing exactly what you're paying it to do.
