Everything in the House That Needs a Subscription

Five devices, five subscriptions, $339.80 a year — and that is each one at its cheapest usable tier. Step every line up one and the same five come to $938.71.

None of it is optional in the sense that matters, because in four of the five cases the hardware does not do the advertised thing without it.

The basket

	Cheapest tier that works	A year	Where we sourced it
A console, online play	Nintendo Switch Online	$19.99	console costs
A video doorbell	Ring Solo, one device	$49.99	doorbell costs
Phone AI, entry tier	Google AI Plus	$59.88	phone AI costs
A VPN, after the intro term	ExpressVPN Basic	$99.95	what a VPN renews at
One streaming service	HBO Max Basic With Ads	$109.99	the cost of removing ads
		$339.80

Every figure is the seller’s own, read between 31 August and 5 September 2026. Where no annual plan exists the yearly figure is the monthly price times twelve, which is arithmetic rather than a price and is flagged as such on the source page.

The tier above is where the money is

The basket above is deliberately mean. It picks online play rather than a games library, one camera rather than a system, an ad-supported streaming tier, and the entry AI plan.

Move each line up exactly one step — Game Pass instead of Switch Online, Ring Pro instead of Solo, Netflix ad-free instead of HBO Max with ads, Google AI Pro instead of Plus, NordVPN instead of ExpressVPN — and the same five categories come to $938.71. Nobody decides to spend that. It is five separate reasonable upgrades, each made months apart.

Two of these are not the price you agreed to

The VPN line is the one that moves without anyone doing anything. ExpressVPN’s Basic tier advertises $2.99 a month and renews at $99.95 a year; NordVPN’s advertises $3.49 and renews at $139.08. Both providers publish both numbers.

The initial term runs 27 or 28 months, which is long enough that the renewal arrives with no memory attached to it.

Where a subscription can genuinely be avoided

Only one of the five has a free path to the same outcome, and it is a hardware choice made before you buy rather than a setting changed afterwards. A doorbell that records to storage you own needs no plan at all — the eufy E340 carries 8GB on board, which is why it appears in our doorbell costing at a three-year total below every subscription route.

The other four have no equivalent. The console needs the plan for online play, the phone AI tier is the product, and streaming is the product. Choosing the cheaper tier is available; choosing none is not.

The apps you already use for free are starting to add a line of their own. Meta One runs from $2.99 to $19.99 a month, and Meta says the free versions stay.

What to actually do

• Write the total down once a year. Individually each of these is a small number and collectively it is not, and the arithmetic is the only thing that makes that visible.
• Check what renews at, not what it costs. Two of the five in this basket change price without notifying anyone.
• Buy the hardware that avoids the subscription where one exists. In this basket that is exactly one category, and it saves more than the device costs.
• Downgrade one tier and see if you notice. Every category here has a step below the one most people are on, and the step is worth between $60 and $180 a year.
• Do this before the sale season, not after. A discount on hardware does nothing to the recurring line it commits you to.