Should you cancel your AI subscription? A short, honest checklist

We sell an AI subscription. So the only version of this page worth publishing is one that can end with you cancelling, and one of the things you might cancel is us. If a checklist written by a subscription company always arrives at "keep paying", it is an advert with numbered steps, and you would be right to close it.

Here is the version we would give a friend. Five checks, about twenty minutes, all of them based on records rather than on how you feel about the app this week.

[FIGURE: A phone screen showing a list of active subscriptions with monthly amounts, one row highlighted and a finger hovering over it]

Step 1. Start from last month's history

Open your chat history and scroll back thirty days. Do not count messages. Write down the tasks.

Most people find something like this: four requests to summarise a long document, one attempt at a difficult email, a birthday message, and nine questions they could have typed into a search box. That list is your actual requirement. The version in your head, where you use it for research and for learning a language, is why you subscribed, and it may bear little relation to what actually happened.

Two months is better than one if your history goes back that far. The month you decide to cancel is usually a month you barely used it, which is exactly the month your judgement is least reliable. Quiet Augusts end. If you cancel on the strength of one flat month and then hit a heavy September, you will resubscribe within a fortnight and have learned nothing except that cancelling felt productive.

Do this now: write the three tasks that genuinely recurred. Everything below is a test of whether those three tasks need a paid plan.

Step 2. Would the free tier do it now?

Free tiers moved a long way in 2026, and the version in your head is probably the one that existed when you signed up.

The big one: on 6 August 2026, OpenAI announced it was removing limits on text based chats for every ChatGPT tier, free included, with the rollout reaching free and Go users the following week. Separate limits stay in place for files, images, voice and image generation (TechCrunch, 6 August 2026). If your three recurring tasks are plain typed conversation, the single most common reason people give for paying, "I keep running out of messages", may simply have stopped being true for you.

Not every provider is moving the same way. Anthropic's weekly limits in Claude Code change on 14 September and land below where they sit today, which we worked through separately, so a Claude subscriber checking this in October is answering a different question from one checking it now.

Ours, stated plainly so you can compare like for like. On our free plan you get 50 messages every 24 hours, 21 of our 60 models, 2 image generations and 2 web searches per 30 days. Memories are a paid feature, and so is exporting your threads. If your list from Step 1 is a handful of text conversations a day with no image generation in sight, our free plan covers it, and we would rather tell you that than take $20.99 a month for something you are not using. Paid plans and what they add are on our pricing section.

Whatever you pay for, go and read its current free tier page today rather than trusting a review written in January.

[FIGURE: Two columns headed "what I actually did last month" and "what the free plan allows", with three tasks written on the left and ticks and one cross on the right]

Step 3. The overlap you are probably paying for twice

Now list every subscription you hold that contains an assistant, including the ones that do not advertise themselves that way.

This is messier than it was a year ago because the bundles keep moving. Microsoft folded its standalone consumer Copilot app into the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in August 2026, removing five consumer features on the way, including Deep Research and the animated character Mico (TechCrunch, 13 August 2026). Google AI Pro arrives wrapped around cloud storage that many people were paying for anyway.

The number to look at is how many separate charges leave your account for something that answers general questions. Installed apps do not matter. If two charges do the same job, one of them is decoration, and the one to cancel is the one your Step 1 list never names.

Watch for: the assistant you never chose. Storage plans, office suites and phone plans have all quietly become AI subscriptions. Check what you already have before you renew a standalone one.

Step 4. Check whether you are inside a promotional rate

Find the renewal date and the price it renews at. These are different numbers surprisingly often.

Google is currently giving US college students a free year of AI Pro, redeemable until 31 December 2026, and its own terms say: "Valid form of payment required at sign-up. Unless cancelled earlier, Google AI Pro will automatically charge $19.99/month after the trial ends." That is a normal, disclosed clause. It is also the entire business model of a free year, and it works because twelve months is longer than anyone's memory. Perplexity ran the same play in India through Airtel, with redemptions closing on 16 January 2026, which means those free years have already run out for the people who took them.

Inside a promotional or introductory rate, the real decision is whether you want this at full price, and the day to make it is a few days before renewal rather than today. Put it in a calendar with the actual price in the event title.

[FIGURE: A calendar month view with a renewal date circled and the words "renews at full price" written into the square]

Trap: annual plans. If you are on a yearly term, cancelling now usually stops the next renewal and changes nothing about this year. The money is spent either way, so the only live question is whether to renew, and you can safely leave that decision until the month before it lands.

Step 5. Now decide

The rule, as plainly as we can put it.

If everything on your Step 1 list is covered by a free tier you have checked this week, cancel. You can come back.
If one paid-only capability appeared more than twice on that list, keep it, and stop rechecking every month.
If two subscriptions answer the same list, keep the one that did the work and cancel the other.
If you are inside a promotional rate, do nothing today except set the calendar reminder from Step 4.

The trap that catches almost everyone: money already spent. Fourteen months of payments is not an argument for a fifteenth. Loyalty is not repaid by subscription billing, and no provider is keeping score. The only question that matters is whether next month earns it.

Cancelling properly, if that is the answer

A few practical things that catch people out.

Cancel where you bought it. If you subscribed inside an iPhone or Android app, the cancellation lives in your Apple or Google subscription settings, and the app can only send you there. Ours does exactly that, and says so.

You normally keep what you paid for. Cancelling stops the next charge and leaves your access running to the end of the current period. That is how ours works and we say so in our own FAQ, and Anthropic's help centre says the same about its plans. Check your provider rather than assuming, because "cancel" and "delete my account" are different buttons with very different consequences.

Get your data out first, while you still have the plan. Some export tools sit behind the paywall you are about to leave. Ours does: exporting threads is in Settings under Data, and it is a Pro feature. Do that before the period ends, not after.

Expect an offer on the way out. Ours shows you 15% off. Take a retention discount only if your checklist already said keep, because a discount on something you stopped using is still a charge you do not need.

If you keep paying, keep paying for a reason

The useful outcome of this checklist is knowing which of your three real tasks the money is buying. Get that clear once, and the next time a provider changes its limits or deletes a feature you liked, you can tell in an afternoon whether the charge still holds up.

Run it again in six months. If you are still paying us then, at least it will be on purpose.