ALKHOBAR: When Omar Al-Harbi opened his banking app and began reviewing the recurring charges linked to his cards, he expected the total to be high. What he did not expect was to discover he was spending nearly SR2,000 ($533) a month on subscriptions. “I knew I had a lot of subscriptions but I always thought of them separately,” the 29-year-old told Arab News. “SR30 here, SR50 there, maybe SR100 for something I use every day. I had never added all of them together.” His various entertainment, gaming and creative packages included Netflix, Shahid, Disney+, YouTube Premium, Spotify, PlayStation Plus, Xbox Game Pass, Discord Nitro, Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva Pro, Midjourney, ChatGPT Plus, iCloud storage and several delivery memberships. The total cost came to more than SR23,000 a year. “That was the first time it felt like a real expense,” he said. “Before that it just felt like a collection of apps.” Al-Harbi’s experience reflects a broader shift in consumer spending habits. Entertainment, software, fitness services, food delivery, cloud storage and even workplace tools are increasingly accessed through recurring monthly or annual payments rather than one-time purchases. The appeal lies in convenience. The challenge is that automatic renewals can make spending easy to overlook. For Al-Harbi, identifying the subscriptions proved easier than deciding which ones to cancel. “The problem is that each subscription has a reason,” he said. “I use one for gaming, another for design, another for music, another for cloud storage. Individually, none of them feels expensive.” Some subscriptions are even harder to classify as optional. For Faisal Al-Dossari, a 32-year-old video editor in Riyadh, recurring software costs are simply part of doing business. His work depends on Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, along with Frame.io for client reviews, Artlist and Epidemic Sound for licensed music, Motion Array and Envato Elements for templates and graphics and cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. “For me, subscriptions are part of the cost of working,” Al-Dossari said. “I need editing software, music licensing, cloud storage and file-transfer services. Cancelling one can actually slow down my work.” What concerns him more is how permanent those expenses have become. “I used to buy software once and keep using it for years,” he said. “Now a lot of the tools I rely on are monthly or annual subscriptions, so the cost never really stops.” Annual renewals, he said, were especially easy to miss. “The monthly ones are obvious because you see them regularly,” he said. “The annual subscriptions are the dangerous ones. You forget about them until SR300 or SR500 suddenly comes out.” The subscription model has expanded far beyond entertainment and professional software. Much of Maha Al-Qahtani’s recurring spending is tied to health and wellness. She pays for a gym membership, Pilates classes, Strava Premium, MyFitnessPal, a meditation app and a meal delivery plan. “I don’t really think of them as subscriptions because in my head they are part of my health routine,” the 27-year-old said. “But when I added the gym, Pilates, apps and meal plan together, it was much more than I expected.” Some of those services help her to stay committed to her goals. “If I’m paying for Pilates or a fitness app, I’m more likely to use it,” she said. But a review of her accounts also revealed unnecessary overlap. “I realized I was paying for two fitness apps that basically did the same thing,” she said. “I had kept both because I forgot one was still renewing.” The tendency to let unused services continue because cancelling requires an active decision helps explain why recurring charges often escape the scrutiny given to larger purchases. A SR40 monthly charge may barely register. But across 10 or 15 services the total can become substantial. Not everyone is willing to accept that trade-off. A year ago Khalid Al-Salem decided to cancel almost all of his recurring services, including Spotify, YouTube Premium, cloud storage services, food delivery memberships and productivity apps. “I realized I was paying for convenience more than I was paying for things I actually used,” the 35-year-old said. Instead of carefully selecting which subscriptions to keep, Al-Salem cancelled nearly all of them. “I cancelled everything for one month and only resubscribed when I genuinely missed something,” he said. “Most of the services never came back.” Today he has only one music subscription, one streaming platform at a time and a cloud storage service he considers essential. The change saved him nearly SR10,000 a year, he said. “The surprising part was that I didn’t feel like I had really given anything up. I was just paying for fewer things I wasn’t using.” Al-Salem now rotates streaming services rather than paying for several simultaneously and avoids signing up for free trials unless he plans to set a cancellation reminder. Al-Harbi has begun making similar adjustments after seeing the scale of his annual spending. He said that he cancelled two streaming services, a gaming membership and several apps he had not opened for months. But he does not intend to abandon his subscriptions altogether. “They make life easier and I use a lot of them,” he said. “I just don’t want SR2,000 leaving my account every month without me noticing.” For Al-Salem, the simplest test is whether a service would survive without automatic renewal. “If you had to manually pay for every subscription every month I think most people would cancel half of them,” he said. In an economy increasingly built around recurring payments, the biggest financial leaks are not always large purchases but the dozens of small charges that quietly accumulate in the background. For many consumers the first step toward saving money is simply knowing where it is going.