Good morning. まさきん here.
Here’s the short version: there’s a category of fixed cost that’s easy to miss entirely — subscriptions that overlap in function.
Each one might only be a few hundred yen. But are you paying for more than one service that does the same job? I think it’s worth taking stock, at least once.
Why Overlaps Happen
Every subscription presumably had a clear purpose when you signed up for it. But things change over time.
You switch to a different service and forget to cancel the old one. A free trial quietly rolls into a paid subscription without you noticing. This kind of thing happens more often than you’d think.
Individually, these are usually in the range of a few hundred to a couple thousand yen. So when you look at your household budget, they never register as a “big expense.” I think that’s exactly why overlaps are so easy to miss.
As a marketer, I’d compare this to running redundant campaigns — multiple initiatives aimed at the same goal, running in parallel. Each one works fine on its own, but looked at as a whole, you’re generating waste.
You won’t notice this kind of overlap unless you’re deliberately looking for it. What you need is the habit of asking, “Do I have two or more things doing the same job here?”
Common Categories Where Overlaps Happen
Let me walk through some of the categories where this tends to show up most.
| Category | Common overlap pattern |
|---|---|
| Password management | Paying for a dedicated app while also using your phone or browser’s built-in password manager |
| Cloud storage | Subscribed to a paid storage-upgrade plan on more than one cloud service |
| Video/music streaming | Subscribed to two similar services but really only using one of them |
| Fitness apps | Signed up for more than one as a trial, and they keep auto-renewing even though you never use them |
| Security software | The software that came pre-installed on your device running alongside a separately purchased one |
This isn’t only a subscription problem, either. Your phone bill can have the exact same structure. Are you still paying for extra lines or options you no longer use? When it comes to surfacing your monthly fixed costs, I think it’s exactly the same mindset as hunting down subscription overlaps.
As a first step, it might be worth running a fee simulation to check what you’re actually paying for right now.
If the result catches your attention, take a look at the link below.
Clicking this opens the Rakuten login page. Once you log in, you’ll see the campaign details.
A Practical Checklist for Finding Overlaps
When I’m hunting for overlaps, here’s the process I actually use.
1. Group your subscriptions by purpose, not by service
First, write down every subscription you currently have. Instead of grouping by price or service name, group them by purpose — the question is “what am I actually using this for?”
For example, sort things into buckets like “for managing passwords” or “for backing up photos.” Once you do that, you’ll often find more than one service sitting in the same bucket.
2. Check your actual usage over the last month or two
Once you’ve grouped things, candidates for overlap will surface. Check the recent usage for each service in that group. Many services let you see your usage history or login history, so use that objective data to judge which one you’re actually using.
3. Check whether a built-in feature can replace it
You might be paying for a dedicated app when a built-in feature would actually cover you just fine. Password management is a good example — your device’s built-in keychain feature is often more than enough.
It’s worth asking yourself honestly whether you really need to keep paying for that dedicated app.
Before You Hit Cancel
Even once you’ve found an overlap, I wouldn’t recommend canceling right away. First, check what’s specific to that service, and how to migrate your data out of it.
This matters especially for password managers and cloud storage. If you cancel before moving your saved data to another service, you risk losing something important.
Before you press that cancel button, make sure your data migration is actually done first.
Wrap-up
Overlapping subscriptions get overlooked precisely because each one is small. But just adopting the mindset of “group by purpose” is enough to uncover them. I think it’s a genuinely simple method.
In my own household, going through our fixed costs, we’ve cleared out overlaps like this one at a time. The same lens works for phone bills too — are you paying for more lines or more carriers than you actually need?
In our case, we ended up consolidating around Rakuten Mobile. That let us clear out the overlap and waste around our communications costs.
If you haven’t sorted through yours yet, it’s worth taking a look at what you’re actually signed up for.
Clicking this opens the Rakuten login page. Once you log in, you’ll see the campaign details.
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