The family subscription audit

No household decides to spend serious money on apps for getting organised. It just builds up.

The password manager arrived after a scare. Cloud storage was upgraded when the photos filled the free space, then upgraded again. A document scanner app charges once a year because it was the quickest way to send the school some forms. Someone added a shared to-do app during a renovation. Each was the right choice at the time. Nobody has looked at the whole pile since.

The cost isn't only money, though four or five subscriptions add up quietly. The bigger problem is that none of them talk to each other. The passport scan is in the cloud drive, its expiry reminder is in a calendar app set up three phones ago, and the login for the passport website is in the password manager under a name nobody remembers. Three subscriptions, one renewal, and the family still nearly missed it.

The 20-minute audit

Do it together. It's a two-person job: one reads, one writes.

Minutes 1 to 8: find everything. Check the subscriptions page in each app store, then look through a bank or card statement for regular payments. Include the yearly ones, because those are the ones you've forgotten. You're making a simple list: the name, the cost per year, and who in the family uses it.

Minutes 9 to 14: write each one's job in one sentence. Not its features, its job in *your* house. "Holds the family photos." "Where the shared bill logins live." If you can't write the sentence, that tells you something. If two subscriptions get the same sentence, that tells you more.

Minutes 15 to 20: sort them into three piles.

• Worth it. Used every week, and nothing else does its job. Keep it and stop feeling guilty about it.
• Overlapping. Two tools with the same sentence, or one whose job something you're keeping could take over.
• Forgotten. Nobody could remember what it was in minute three. Cancel it today, not "when the year runs out", because you won't remember then either.

The honest part

Sometimes separate tools are exactly right, and anyone talking about cutting back should say so. If someone in the house takes photography seriously, proper photo storage isn't overlap. It's the right tool. If your employer requires a particular password manager, keep it for work. If a single-purpose app is loved and used every day, it's probably one of the better subscriptions you have. The aim is a list you chose on purpose, not the shortest list possible.

The overlap worth looking at is in the middle of the pile: when the family tier of a password manager, part of the cloud storage, the document scanner and the reminders app all exist mainly to manage *family paperwork*. Then you're paying several times for one job, and that job's information is split across tools that can't see each other. That's the case a family vault is built for: documents, passwords and the reminders they create, in one place, filed under the person they belong to.

That's the job we built Vault For Us to do, with plans sized by people: Pearl for two, Sapphire for four and Diamond for eight, from ₹149 or $2.99 a month.

What it looks like afterwards

Not minimalism. A short list where every line has a sentence next to it, one place the family agrees is where the paperwork lives, and a calendar note to do the audit again next year. It will drift again, and twenty minutes a year is a small price for knowing what you're paying for.