Make the most of free trials

You can normally only sign up for free trials once, but there are lots of them to work your way through, especially when it comes to music, audiobooks and TV and film streaming.

For example, Spotify Premium offers a month free (normally £11.99 a month), Apple TV+ a week free (normally £8.99 a month), BFI Player 14 days free (then £6.99 a month), Audible 30 days free (then £7.99 a month) … the list goes on.

The key to making the most of free trials is to be sure to cancel before the trial ends and the payments begin.

The cancellation game

If a subscription starts looking a bit too expensive, Vix Leyton, a consumer expert and co-host of the Spendology podcast, suggests starting the cancellation process and seeing what happens.

She says: “This can trigger ‘retention’ offers that poor old existing customers wouldn’t get to see otherwise. This could be anything from being able to pause for no extra cost to slashing the bill. If you choose to walk away, you may still get a follow-up ‘break-up’ message incentivising you to come back.”

Do a subscription audit

It’s easy to lose track of everything you have signed up for – so keep a regular check on what you are paying for. For example, many people find they have signed up to several cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox and OneDrive, when just one will do.

“Look at passive subscriptions quietly winging out of your account and evaluate if you’re getting better-value usage than just signing up again when you need it,” Leyton says.

“If you’ve been paying for something that you haven’t used for more than a year, then it’s worth cancelling and using that ‘found money’ to set up a direct debit or payment out for that amount to go directly into a savings accounts or to explore longer-term savings and investments.”

Subscribe and save

Many retailers offer “subscribe and save” deals where you commit to a regular delivery of certain products and get a discount (usually 10% to 15%) on the usual retail price. It’s particularly handy for heavy or bulky items (washing powder, dog food, etc) that you don’t want to cart back from the shops, but know that you will need every month.

For example, Who Gives A Crap sells 48 rolls of Bamboo toilet paper for £48 but it’s £43 if you subscribe for a delivery every two, three or four months.

Get the subscription price – but don’t commit

A handy trick with most subscribe and save deals is that you can cancel the subscription at any time. This means you can sign up for a subscription, benefit from the cheaper price for a one-off purchase, then immediately cancel the recurring payment.

For example, say you wanted to try London Nootropics coffee. It’s £15 for a 12-sachet selection box. But the same box is £12 if you subscribe. So, with this type of offer, you could sign up for a subscription, then cancel it after the first box is dispatched.

Can you get it free or cheaper?

Before you set up a subscription, check if there is a way of getting the item of service for free, or cheaper. For example, if you buy certain Apple devices, you get three months’ free Apple TV+ or Apple Music.

Amazon Prime normally costs £8.99 a month. But O2 customers on monthly plans can add Prime to their O2 account and get a £2 discount off their phone bill each month, effectively bringing the monthly Prime fee down to £6.99.

Once you have Prime, you can get free Deliveroo Plus Silver for a year, which normally costs £3.49 a month.

Some premium bank accounts include subscriptions as a perk. For example, Club Lloyds (currently £3 a month) offers an annual choice of either 12 months of Disney+, six cinema tickets, an annual digital Coffee Club and Gourmet Society membership, or an annual magazine subscription.

Check your private health insurance policy, too (if you have one). For example, Vitality offers discounts on gym memberships, Weight Watchers and Headspace.

Hit pause

Budget gym chains such as PureGym or The Gym Group offer monthly contracts which you can cancel any time. So, if you are going on holiday for a few weeks, it may be worth cancelling before you go and rejoining when you return – but check if you would have to pay a joining fee again.

Freezing your membership while you are away might be an option, so check your membership contract to see if that is allowed.

More expensive gyms tend to be less flexible with membership freezes, and you may need to prove you suffered an injury or are ill or pregnant to pause payments.

Rotate TV subs (keep the ads)

Television fans can find themselves paying out for multiple TV subscriptions, but not always watching them all every month.

Liz Hunter, the commercial director at Money Expert, says: “Instead of juggling multiple subscriptions, try rotating your streaming services to save money, and only subscribe as and when there are things you really want to watch.

“To be more organised, you could look ahead for the year at specific things you want to watch, along with which platform they’re on and when, and then plan which platform you’ll need to subscribe to each month, so you can find out what you’ll be spending each month and also when you’ll need to cancel.”

Several TV streaming services charge less for plans with adverts. Disney+ costs £4.99 a month with ads, while Netflix’s equivalent plan costs £5.99 a month, for example.

Rotate the name on the account

If you live with someone else, it is often a good idea to replace a subscription that’s expiring with their details rather than renew as an existing customer. This is because many providers offer their best deals to new customers.

Alex King, the founder of the Generation Money website, says: “This can save a huge amount on telecoms bills in particular. For example, if you’re signing up to Virgin Media or Sky, you’ll often see a price increase after your first year or 18 months. If you cancel at the end of your subscription and sign up, for example, in your partner’s name as a new customer, you’ll often get a much better deal – better even than a retention department will offer.”

Get cheaper Amazon deliveries

King uses a Prime hack to get cheaper deliveries. He says: “If you’re not a subscriber to Amazon Prime and are making a purchase on Amazon that doesn’t qualify for free delivery, you can subscribe to Prime to get free delivery and then unsubscribe immediately after your order has gone through.

“Amazon will usually give you a pro-rata refund which, if you unsubscribed on the same day, means you’ll only have paid around 50p to get the free (and fast) delivery on your purchase. This is much cheaper than paying standard delivery prices. I would recommend this is not done too often, though, as Amazon may flag your account for abuse of their refund rules.”

Share subscriptions

Sharing your streaming subscriptions within your household is much cheaper than having a plan each. If you live with someone else, ask your partner or housemate to compare subscriptions, to check you are not paying twice for anything.

For example, while Spotify Premium is £11.99 a month for an individual, you can buy a Premium Family plan for £19.99 a month covering up to six people at one address.

Don’t despair if you live alone.Sharesub.com is a platform that enables you to share subscriptions with friends – or strangers – and split the costs. Although some providers have clamped down on sharing subscriptions outside your household, the site argues that it is not illegal.

Pay annually

If you know for sure that you will make use of a particular subscription, then paying annually rather than monthly will usually work out cheaper.

But watch out for auto-renewal. Some providers use renewals as an excuse for a cheeky price rise. Microsoft, for example, recently upped the annual cost of Microsoft 365 from £59.99 to £84.99, with the extra fee apparently paying for extra features.

But Microsoft users can beat the price rise by logging in to their account and switching their plan to “classic” – this means they should be able to pay £59.99 for another year (but they won’t get the new AI features).