Is that app subscription worth it? Count the hours you use it

5 October 2026 · 6 min read

Divide what the subscription costs per month by the hours you really used the app that month. The result is a cost per hour you can compare across everything you pay for, and it usually sorts the list into clear keeps and clear cancels within a few minutes. The price is easy to find. Honest hours take more work, and for some kinds of app, hours are the wrong test altogether.

List what you are paying for

Start with the full list, because the subscriptions that most need a look are the ones you have forgotten.

Open the App Store, click your name at the bottom of the sidebar, then Account Settings. Scroll to Subscriptions and click Manage. That shows everything billed through Apple.
For the rest, search your email for “receipt”, “renewal” and “invoice”, and read one card statement line by line.
Look back a full twelve months for annual plans. They renew once and are easy to miss.
Write each one as a monthly figure. For annual plans, divide by twelve.

Find the hours you used each one

Do not estimate this part. An app you opened every day for one week in the spring feels like an app you use every day.

Screen Time. Open System Settings, Screen Time, App & Website Activity. Switch to the week view and step back through recent weeks, noting the time for each app on your list. There is no export, so this is done by hand, and the totals include evenings and weekends.

A record of your workday. Punchcard sits in the menu bar and notices which app is in front, then prints a receipt at the closing time you set. The receipt itself is not the right view for this job: it lists the top five apps of the day and groups the rest as MISC, and a subscription you rarely use will be in MISC. Use the CSV export instead. It has one row per session with a start, an end, the app and the seconds.

Export the CSV from Punchcard and open it in a spreadsheet.
Filter the app column to the app you are checking.
Add up the seconds for the month and divide by 3600 to get hours.

A formula does the same thing in one cell. If the app name is in column C and the seconds are in column E:

=SUMIF(C:C,"Example",E:E)/3600

Change the column letters to match your file, and the name to match how the app appears in it.

Tracking in Punchcard is free and never expires, and the CSV export works without a license, so the audit costs nothing. It does need a month of record behind it. If you are starting today, the audit is next month’s job.

Subscriptions that live in a browser tab

A service you use on the web has no app line of its own. Its hours are inside the browser’s total. Punchcard’s itemized browsing (optional, off by default) prints sites as their own lines and adds the site to each CSV row. It works in a specific set of browsers and not in Safari; How to see how much time you spend on each website on a Mac has the list and the steps. Sites used for under a minute stay on the browser’s line.

Do the division

Some worked examples, to show the range:

$12 a month, used for 3 hours: $4 an hour.
$20 a month, used for 60 hours: about 33 cents an hour.
$8 a month, used for 0 hours: there is nothing to divide. That one is the easy decision.

There is no universal threshold for a good figure. The comparison that matters is against your own other tools, and against what an hour of that work is worth to you. Sort the list from most expensive per hour to least and look hard at the top three.

When hours in front are the wrong test

Cost per hour is a good first sort and a poor final verdict. Several kinds of subscription earn their price without ever being in front of you.

Background tools. Backup, password management, file sync, storage. Their value is in what happens while you are not looking. Judge them by whether you would notice the day they stopped.
Rare but critical tools. Something you open twice a year, where each use saves a day. Divide the annual price by the number of uses, and check whether paying monthly for only those months would be cheaper.
Seasonal work. A tool for tax season or an annual report will look idle for ten months. Check a full cycle before you cancel.
Shared plans. If a family or a team is on the plan, your hours are only part of the use.

The measurement has limits of its own. Time in front is not the same as use: an app that renders or syncs behind another window gets no time while something else is in front, and an app left in front while you read a printout beside it is credited with work it did not do. Read the hours as a strong hint, not a meter.

Decide, and set a reminder

For each line there are more options than keep or cancel:

Keep it, knowing the number.
Cancel it.
Drop to a cheaper tier if you use only part of it.
Switch from annual to monthly and pay only in the months you need it.
Replace it with a pay-once tool where a good one exists. Subscription time trackers vs pay-once apps covers that trade for one category, and What a Mac utility should cost covers it more broadly.

Then put an event in Calendar a week before each annual renewal, with the cost per hour in the notes. Before renewal day the decision is free; the day after, it has cost a year.

For what it is worth, Punchcard is a one-time purchase ($9 once, needed only for printing receipts after the first two), so it does not add a line to the list it helps you audit.

Questions

How do I find subscriptions I forgot about?

Read twelve months of card statements for amounts that repeat, check the Subscriptions list in the App Store, and search your email for renewal notices. The forgotten ones are often annual.

Is an annual plan always the better deal?

Per month, usually. Overall, only if you would have paid for most of those months anyway. If the record shows you use a tool in three months of the year, three monthly payments may come to less.

Can I check whether I have opened an app at all, without tracking anything?

Yes. Finder keeps a Date Last Opened for each app. How to see when an app was last opened on a Mac shows where to find it. It gives a date, not hours, but a date from last winter is an answer in itself.

What about an app I rarely use but would miss?

Keep it. The number is there to inform the decision, not to make it. The goal is to stop paying for things by accident, not to stop paying for things you value.