Services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, and even Kindle Unlimited, are being used daily. But when is the last time you stopped to think how much all these subscriptions are costing you monthly?

“Consumers need to sharpen their pencils around their use of streaming services,” tech journalist, Carmi Levy said. “In fact, price increases year over year have significantly exceeded the rate of inflation in almost all cases.”

Over 80 per cent of Canadians are paying monthly for some form of streaming subscription, according to Convergence Research.

“The sad reality is that in many cases, our monthly bill is a lot higher than it was back then because we’re not just subscribing to one streaming service, we’re subscribing to many of them at the same time,” Levy continued. “So even if a Netflix subscription is less than, say, your cable, your satellite TV bill would have been back in the day. Yeah, Netflix isn’t the only streaming service that most people have. And so, month after month, those dollars add up and before you realize it, it’s a pretty significant hit to your personal budget.”

Fanshawe student ‘Grayson,’ whose family subscribes to two streaming services, said people are paying roughly the same as they were for cable, yet they have less choice in what they watch than ever.

“I think it’s recreating what cable TV used to be, except now you can only watch things that Amazon wants you to watch, which is kind of not fair,” ‘Grayson’ said. “With cable, you got to choose what channels that you wanted to pay for. But with Amazon, it’s kind of curated for only whatever benefits the company of Amazon.”

Canceling these streaming services can be a hassle, added student, Sierra Leblanc.

“It’s so hard to cancel,” Leblanc said. “I’ll forget and then I will try to cancel it because I don’t need it now and the streaming platform is like, ‘Oh, sorry, you have to cancel it in a certain amount of days before this subscription renews or we can’t give you your money back,’ and then you’re out 20 bucks.”

The US is currently cracking down on streaming services, with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently finalizing a “click to cancel” initiative.

“The industry’s dirty little secret is that it’s incredibly easy to sign up for a new service or subscription, but it’s incredibly difficult to cancel that subscription afterward,” Levy said. “You should make it just as easy to exit a service as it is to start with a service and you should not penalize consumers to the point that they just give up trying because you’ve made it so difficult for them to do so, that is unfair.”

Making canceling streaming services so hard is anti-consumer, Levy went on to say.

“It’s good to see the US moving in this direction and I really do hope that Canada follows suit quickly,” Levy said.

There are ways to ensure you aren’t paying more than you need to be, with streaming services now adding cheaper memberships with ads.

“If you are subscribing to a number of these services and you’re not really focused or paying attention to what they’re costing you that can have a huge impact on your monthly budget,” Levy said. “I think this is a good opportunity to start looking at what you’re subscribing to, what it’s costing you, what you’re getting from it.”

It could financially benefit people to track their streaming usage for a month to see if all streaming services are needed and if they are paying for things that you aren’t actually using, according to Levy.