Your Wallet Called. It's Crying. A Definitive Ranking of the Wildest Subscriptions You Forgot You're Paying For
Once a month, somewhere in America, a person opens their banking app to check their balance, sees a charge for $6.99 from a service called something like "Fern+" or "SliceBox" or "MoodWater Premium," and experiences five distinct emotional stages in rapid succession: confusion, vague recognition, mild shame, brief consideration of cancelling, and then — the most American of all responses — doing absolutely nothing about it.
This article is for that person. This article is about that person. This article might, legally speaking, be that person.
The subscription economy has officially eaten itself. What started as a reasonable idea — pay a little each month, get a thing you like — has metastasized into a baroque ecosystem of hyper-specific, increasingly surreal services that exist because some venture capitalist in 2021 looked at a spreadsheet and thought, yes, someone will pay monthly for this. And then someone did. Possibly you.
We've ranked the offenders. We've assigned feelings. We regret nothing.
Tier One: "Okay Fine, I Get It" (Still Embarrassing Though)
The Streaming Service You Have for One Show
You know the one. You signed up in February for that show. You watched it in a weekend. It's now August. You have seen the same three recommended titles on the home screen so many times they feel like roommates. The subscription costs $9.99/month. You have spent $79.92 on this one show. The DVD would have cost $14.
Ranking: 4/10 unhinged. Extremely common. The participation trophy of bad financial decisions.
The Meal Kit That Sends You Ingredients for Meals You Could Make From Memory
Listen. The little cards are cute. The portions are weirdly precise. But if your HelloFresh box showed up this week with ingredients for pasta with marinara sauce and you live in the United States of America in the 21st century, we need to have a conversation about what you think you're getting from this relationship. Costs approximately $11 per serving. A box of pasta costs $1.29. You do the math, because apparently the meal kit company is doing it for you.
Ranking: 5/10 unhinged. Aspirational in a very specific, sad way.
Tier Two: "I Have Questions" (The Sweet Spot)
Candle of the Month Club — The Premium Tier
Basic candle subscription: understandable. $12/month, you get a candle, life goes on. But we're talking about the $45/month "artisanal small-batch hand-poured soy candle with a curated scent story and a handwritten note from the chandler" tier. The note is not handwritten. The chandler is a Shopify store. The scent this month is called "Petrichor & Regret" and it smells like a Bath & Body Works having an existential crisis.
Ranking: 6/10 unhinged. Aspirational. Delusional. Smells incredible.
A Sleep App That Costs More Per Year Than a Therapist Visit
Calm, Headspace, and their seventeen competitors have built a combined empire on the premise that what your anxiety really needs is a $70/year app featuring a man with a British accent telling you to notice your breath. To be fair: it works, a little, sometimes, if you actually open it, which you don't, because you're too anxious about the $70 charge.
Ranking: 6/10 unhinged. Circular in a way that feels almost intentional.
[We don't have time to fully process LinkedIn Premium in this article. We've allocated it a line and moved on for everyone's wellbeing.]
Ranking: 7/10 unhinged. You're paying to see who looked at your profile. They were recruiters. They were not going to hire you. You looked at their profiles back. Nobody won.
Tier Three: "Who Pitched This?" (We're Getting Somewhere)
Hyper-Specific Streaming Services for Things That Already Exist on YouTube for Free
Somewhere between 2019 and now, the streaming wars produced some genuinely bewildering casualties. There is a service — real, actual, currently operating — dedicated entirely to British panel shows. There is one for classic game shows. There is one, and please read this carefully, specifically for fishing content. It costs $7.99/month. There is also, reportedly, a platform for real-time plant growth footage, which sounds like a joke until you consider that 40 million Americans bought houseplants during the pandemic and at least some percentage of them are unwell enough to watch them grow in real time. God bless those people. They are Quolomo's target demographic.
Ranking: 8/10 unhinged. Genuinely admire the specificity. Someone ran the numbers on the fishing thing and they added up. That's almost inspiring.
The Wellness Box That Sends You Supplements You've Never Heard Of
$39.99/month. Inside: a packet of something called "Maca Ashwagandha Clarity Blend," a tiny bottle of mushroom tincture, a card explaining the benefits of "grounding," and a crystal that the box's Instagram describes as "energetically cleansed." You have taken none of these supplements. You have, however, arranged them attractively on your bathroom counter, which is doing something for your self-image, so arguably this is working.
Ranking: 8/10 unhinged. The crystal alone is worth a tier upgrade.
Tier Four: "Okay, Respect" (Full Chaos, No Notes)
A Subscription to Physical Newspapers You Read Digitally for Free
This isn't a joke — this is actually a based and honorable choice and we're including it here because it costs money and most people do it by accident when a free trial expires. If you're doing it on purpose: you are a good person and journalism thanks you. If you forgot it was happening: same result, still good.
Ranking: Unrankable. Morally complex. Moving on.
Whatever You're Paying for Cloud Storage Because You Won't Delete Your Photos
You have 47,000 photos on your phone. Eleven thousand of them are screenshots of things you were going to read later. You are paying $2.99/month for the privilege of storing a screenshot of a tweet about a restaurant you will never visit. The restaurant has since closed. The tweet has been deleted. The screenshot remains. You will never delete it. This is fine.
Ranking: 9/10 unhinged. Peak modern human behavior. We salute you.
The Part Where We Get Sincere (Briefly, Don't Worry)
Here's the thing about the subscription economy that nobody really says out loud: it works because optimism is a renewable resource. Every subscription you signed up for represented a version of yourself you genuinely intended to become — the person who meditates, who cooks from scratch, who reads the newspaper, who monitors their plants with scientific rigor.
The $12/month plant growth streaming service isn't absurd. It's aspirational. It's someone saying, I want to be the kind of person who pays attention to slow, beautiful things. That's not a bad impulse. It's just maybe a $12/month impulse you could redirect toward, say, going outside and looking at an actual plant.
But also: keep the candle subscription. "Petrichor & Regret" genuinely sounds incredible. We want to know if it's still available.
Check your bank statements. Cancel two things. Keep the weird one. That's our official advice and we stand by it.
