Canva Renewed Itself Again This Morning

Dear friend,

Canva Pro renewed itself again this morning. Twelve dollars and ninety-nine cents, same as every month, and my phone buzzed with the receipt before I was even out of bed. I opened my banking app to check the balance and found five of those charges in a row, same amount, same date, going back to April.

So today's letter is about the receipt you stopped reading, not the one that scares you. Nobody is about to hand you a plan. You're allowed to just look at one number.

April 3 was the last time I posted a new listing to my Etsy shop. Five months. Five times $12.99. Sixty-four dollars and ninety-five cents for a subscription to design product photos I haven't designed since spring. I didn't do that math because I was mad at myself. I did it because my card got declined at the gas pump on Tuesday, and I went looking for where the money had actually gone, and there it was, quietly renewing, exactly on schedule, asking nothing of me and getting paid anyway. Nobody canceled it. Nobody had to. That's the whole trick of a subscription.

A woman in a Facebook group for print-on-demand sellers called this moneymaxxing last week, squeezing more out of money you already have instead of chasing more of it. Refinancing a loan counts. Moving cash into a savings account that actually pays you counts. So does looking at what auto-renews on a business that's gone quiet.

I'm not moneymaxxing anything today. I'm not consolidating debt or shopping interest rates. I looked at one number, $12.99, and where it's been going since April. That's the whole action.

Other people's versions of this are running right now, quietly, on cards all over this list. A stock-photo site nobody's logged into since spring. A scheduling app for a podcast that stopped in June. A $6.99 background-music library for Reels that don't get posted anymore. None of these are failures. They're subscriptions that outlasted the reason for them, the same way gym memberships and group chats do.

I could tell you to cancel it. That's the obvious next line. It isn't the point of this letter.

The point is that I didn't know the number until I went looking for it. Not knowing cost me more than $12.99 ever did. Sixty-four dollars and ninety-five cents left my account without my permission. Nobody stole it. I just stopped paying attention to something I'd agreed to months ago and never uncanceled. The subscription didn't do anything wrong. It did exactly what I signed up for, on the same day, every month, for five months straight, while I was busy somewhere else entirely. That's the whole cost of not looking.

Here's what I heard myself say about it this week, and what I'd rather say instead.

I'm not going to tell you to audit your subscriptions today. That's homework, and this letter doesn't hand out homework.

What I'll say instead is smaller. You're allowed to open the app, the banking one, not Instagram, and just look. Not fix, not cancel, not total March through September into one shame number. Look once. Twelve dollars and ninety-nine cents has been leaving my account for a shop I haven't touched since April, and today I did nothing about it except see it clearly: $12.99, twelve times a year, on a life that's currently busy doing something else.

I still have the subscription. I might cancel it tonight. I might not. Either way, seeing it stopped being invisible, and invisible was the only part of it that was actually costing me anything.

You're allowed to see your own version of this without doing anything about it yet. The seeing is the whole instruction. A stock-photo site, a ring light payment plan, a $6 app you forgot existed. Whatever it is, you get to know its name and its number today. Nothing else is required of you.

Keep the door open,

P.S. — I still haven't canceled it. I opened the app twice to do it and closed it both times. I don't fully know why. Maybe it feels like proof the shop is still a shop. I'll probably cancel it Friday. Maybe not.