How Much Are Your Subscriptions Really Costing You in Canada?

Five common streaming apps at their current Canadian prices already add up to about $79 a month. Add the subscriptions people forget about, such as an app trial that converted to paid, a meal kit on pause or a cloud storage plan nobody downgraded, and most households are paying more than they would guess if you asked them cold.

The short answer
Netflix, Crave, Disney+, Apple TV+, and Spotify alone run about $78.96 a month in Canada as of 2026, or roughly $947 a year. Pull three months of bank statements to find what else is billing quietly, then cancel anything you haven't opened in 60 days.

What five common subscriptions actually cost in 2026

Prices for streaming and music services in Canada have moved more than most people track. Spotify raised its Individual plan in May 2026, Crave and Disney+ both sell an ad-supported tier that's easy to mistake for the full price, and Netflix's cheapest plan is a third of the cost of its most expensive one. Here's what five widely used services cost right now.

That's $78.96 a month, or $947.52 a year, for five apps most households would describe as "just the basics." Swap Netflix Standard for Premium 4K ($23.99) or Crave's ad-free tier for its full HBO bundle, and the total climbs further. None of this includes a gym membership, cloud storage, a news subscription, or the app trial that quietly converted to paid eight months ago.

Prices from MoneySense's 2026 Canadian streaming price guide and MobileSyrup's coverage of Spotify's May 2026 Canadian price increase. Prices can change after publication; check each provider before budgeting around them.

Why the total keeps climbing even if your list doesn't

The five services above aren't outliers. Statistics Canada's Consumer Price Index shows video and audio subscription prices rose 21.0% between 2019 and 2024, and 52.7% since 2014, well ahead of general inflation over the same stretch. Cellular service prices, by contrast, fell 48.5% over the 2019-to-2024 window. So the connection you need to stream got cheaper while the content running through it got steadily more expensive, and Canadian households spent $11.3 billion on cable, satellite, and streaming distribution services in 2024 alone.

Figures are from Statistics Canada's "The medium is cheaper, but the message is pricier" analysis, published July 2, 2025.

What else counts as a subscription

The five apps above are the ones people remember when you ask. The ones that actually inflate the total are the quieter category: a cloud storage upgrade from two years ago, a photo editing app's "pro" tier, a meditation app renewal, a meal kit paused instead of cancelled, a single-article paywall that became a monthly plan. None of those show up when you're guessing from memory. They only show up on a statement, or on your phone's app store billing page, which routes some charges through a stored card that never touches your bank statement directly.

A 15-minute subscription audit that actually works

Most people already know they should "check their subscriptions." Almost nobody does it, because scrolling a PDF bank statement line by line is tedious and easy to abandon halfway through. Here's a version that takes about fifteen minutes and holds up.

• Pull the last three months of bank and credit card statements. A quarterly bill or an annual renewal won't show up in any one month.
• Flag every merchant name you don't immediately recognize. Search the name if you have to; some app store charges show up as a generic processor name instead of the app itself.
• For everything you do recognize, ask when you last actually opened or used it. If the honest answer is "I don't remember," that's your cancel list.
• Check your phone's app store subscription page separately. Apple and Google both bill subscriptions that never touch your bank statement directly if they're routed through a stored card on file with the store.

A one-time cleanup buys you a few months of relief at best. The real test comes three months later, when a free trial you forgot about converts to paid and the whole list quietly grows back the same way it did the first time. Repeat the check, or let a dashboard flag new recurring charges as they show up.

Cancel, downgrade, or keep? A quick way to decide

Why this is harder to catch on your own than it sounds

Willpower isn't really the obstacle here. Recurring charges are built to be low-friction at signup and just as low-friction to keep paying, so the moment you'd naturally reconsider one never arrives on its own; you have to manufacture it yourself. Cross-referencing three statements against a mental list is exactly the kind of task that gets postponed, which is why the same forgotten subscriptions tend to survive one audit after another.

The realistic target

Nobody needs zero subscriptions, and the $78.96 a month from the five apps above is fine if a household genuinely uses all five. What actually costs money is the second, invisible list sitting on top of it: the meditation app renewal, the cloud storage tier nobody downsized, the trial that converted eight months ago. Cutting two or three of those is usually worth more per year than debating whether to drop Netflix, and unlike Netflix, it's a decision you only have to make once.

Pilot Wealth is not a financial advisor. This article is for educational purposes only and is not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Pricing and figures referenced are from the cited public sources and may have changed since publication.