Why "Just Cancelling" Is Harder Than It Looks
Quick test: how many active subscriptions do you actually have right now? Most people underestimate it — not because they're careless, but because subscription pricing is deliberately built to be forgettable. A charge that feels like "small coffee money" each month is easy to wave off, until you add up twelve of them.
Cancellation flows are often built to be slow and mildly annoying on purpose — enough friction that most people put it off.
The unused gym membership stays active because cancelling feels like giving up on the goal, not just the subscription.
A large share of software and membership accounts sit completely unused while billing quietly continues in the background.
The "Rule of 120" & The Death of Ownership
In Chapter 3, The Death of Ownership, the book walks through how easily we trade a one-off purchase for an open-ended lease — and what that actually costs over time.
The Rule of 120: if a one-off purchase costs less than 120 months of renting the same thing, buying it outright usually wins. It's a rough rule, not a law of physics — but it's a useful gut check.
While writing this, I went through my own accounts and found I was paying over $100 a month across a handful of AI, design and writing tools — several of which I'd forgotten I still had. Consolidating down to what I actually use saved a meaningful amount, with nothing I actually relied on lost. Chapter 6 walks through how I did it.