AI Subscription Audit: A Five-Step Checklist for What You Actually Pay

TL;DR: An AI subscription audit lists every AI charge, re-prices each plan against its own vendor page, then scores it on use rather than intent. Five steps, about thirty minutes, and one decision per plan: keep it, downgrade it, cancel it, or fold it into one subscription.

An AI subscription audit is a half-hour exercise that replaces your sense of what you spend on AI with a number. It matters because AI charges are unusually good at hiding: they are small individually, they use unrecognisable statement descriptors, and they accumulate one reasonable decision at a time. Perspective AI sells the one subscription that a completed audit often points toward, at $14.99/mo, so read the recommendation with that in mind and check our price the same way you are about to check everyone else's.

This belongs in the use cases hub because it is a procedure rather than a comparison. For the reference prices you will check against, there is a market-wide index of what these plans charge.

How Do You Audit Your AI Subscriptions?

List every AI charge from a statement, re-price each plan against its own vendor page today, score it on last month's use, then assign one of four outcomes. Five steps, about thirty minutes.

• Claude Pro: best for long documents and careful writing, $20/mo, or $200 for a year.
• Microsoft 365 Premium: best when the office suite is the real purchase, $19.99/mo, or $199.99 for a year.
• Venice AI Pro: best for open-weight models with browser-held history, $18/mo.
• GitHub Copilot Pro: best for editor completions, $10/mo.
• Abacus ChatLLM Basic: best for a cheap chat with a large credit pool, $10/mo after the promotional first month.
• Perspective AI Starter: best as the single line that replaces several of the above, $14.99/mo.

Every price above was read off the vendor's own page on 18 August 2026. Two vendors, OpenAI and Google, would not serve their consumer pricing pages to an automated request, so they are absent rather than estimated. You will hit the same wall, and the fix is to open those two in a browser and read them yourself.

Step 1: Find the Charges, Because the Statement Hides Them

Do not start from memory or from a list of apps on your phone. Start from a statement, and search it three ways.

• By vendor name, including parent companies. A charge frequently carries the corporate entity rather than the product you recognise.
• By app store. Subscriptions bought inside an iOS or Android app bill through the store, so they appear under the store's name and are easy to miss entirely.
• Across twelve months, not one. Annual plans charge once. A monthly review is structurally blind to them, which is exactly how a forgotten annual subscription survives three audits.

Write each one down with its amount and the date it renews. The renewal date is the part everyone skips and the part that decides what you can act on this month.

Step 2: Re-Price Every Plan Against Its Own Vendor Page

The price you remember is the price when you subscribed. This market re-prices constantly, and the number in any article, including this one, is a snapshot with a date attached.

Open each vendor's pricing page and write down today's figure next to your remembered one. Two things fall out of this immediately. First, you find plans that have gone up, which is a decision you never consciously made. Second, you find tiers that did not exist when you subscribed, which frequently means the tier you are on is no longer the right one.

This is also where you notice bundling. Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99/mo is an office suite with Copilot attached, not an AI subscription, and it should leave the AI column of your audit entirely. Mixing bundles into the AI total is the most common way an audit produces a wrong answer.

Step 3: The $40 Annual Discount, and the $7 That Is Really $10

Two pricing mechanics distort the audit if you do not catch them, and both were visible on vendor pages on the day this page was written.

The annual discount is real and remarkably consistent. Of the plans that published both billing periods on 18 August 2026, the annual saving was almost identical in dollar terms:

Two independent vendors, two different products, and a discount that lands within eleven cents and one tenth of a percentage point of each other. That is the number this page contributes that no other page has: the annual discount in this market is not a negotiation, it is a convention worth about $40 a year per plan.

The trap is what it does to an audit. Annual billing is an excellent trade on a plan you are certain about and a bad one on a plan you are auditing precisely because you are unsure. Paying twelve months up front to save $40 converts a reversible decision into an irreversible one, on exactly the plans where reversibility is the thing you need.

Headline prices can be promotional. Abacus ChatLLM's own pricing page displayed "$7" struck against "$10" on 18 August 2026: a first-month rate, not the plan price. Record the recurring number, never the one in the largest type.

Step 4: Score Use, Not Intent

Everyone audits against the version of themselves who subscribed. Score against last month instead, and use a scale coarse enough that you cannot argue with it.

• Daily. You opened it most working days. Keep.
• Weekly. Real but not central. This is the row consolidation is aimed at.
• Monthly or less. You are paying a retainer for an option. Cancel and re-subscribe if you miss it.
• Cannot remember. Cancel today. The inability to recall is the finding.

The uncomfortable pattern this surfaces: the plan people resent paying for is usually not the plan they use least. Resentment tracks price, and cancellations should track use. If you only act on the expensive one you will keep three cheap subscriptions you never open.

Step 5: Keep, Downgrade, Cancel, or Fold Into One Subscription

Assign exactly one outcome per plan. Four options, no fifth, no "decide later".

1. Keep a daily plan whose model family you genuinely depend on, or a bundle you bought for its non-AI half.
2. Downgrade where a lower tier exists and your use has never touched the ceiling. Check for tiers that appeared after you subscribed.
3. Cancel anything in the monthly-or-less band. Access usually runs to the end of the period you already paid for, so the cost of being wrong is nothing until the next renewal.
4. Consolidate the weekly band. Several weekly plans across different labs is the exact shape that one multi-model subscription replaces, and the full arithmetic is in the case for collapsing several AI plans into one.

Before you cancel anything, export what you want to keep, while the account is still live. What survives a move and what does not is set out in the honest account of what switching AI tools costs you.

Six Plans, One Decision Each: The Finished Audit

A finished audit is a short table: every AI charge, today's real price beside it, a use band, and one of four outcomes. Most people running it for the first time find one charge they had forgotten, one plan on an old tier, and one annual renewal approaching that they would not have chosen again.

If the weekly band has more than two rows in it, the arithmetic that follows is not subtle. Three ordinary plans verified today total $49.99 a month against $14.99 for one multi-model subscription, and the audit is what tells you whether that comparison applies to you or not. Price the last row of your audit against ours.

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