The hidden cost of subscription stacking.
Published May 14, 2026
I want to do some math with you.
I was sitting at my desk a few months back, going through my bank statement looking for a charge I didn’t recognize. I never found that charge. But I found something else.
I found a Coursera renewal notification.
I had signed up a year ago to take a course on a software program I thought would help with one aspect of my business. I never ended up using that software. I don’t think I finished the course. And here was Coursera, gently letting me know they were about to charge me again — for another year of a thing I’d already failed to use the first time.
I canceled it. Then I sat there with my coffee and started actually adding up what I was paying for, every month, to keep a one-person sticker business running.
Canva Pro: Yes, real, I use it every day for my stickers. Keeping it.
Google (yearly): Storage for my work, my photos, my apps. Worth it.
Coursera: A course I never finished, for software I never used. Canceled today.
QuickBooks Self-Employed (in the past): Had it. Paid for it. Avoided opening it. Canceled.
Monday.com (in a past life): Tried it. Wasn’t built for one person. Canceled.
The Coursera one was the punch in the stomach. That wasn’t even a tool I was actively using and resenting. That was a tool I had completely forgotten about. The renewal notification was the only reason I knew I was still paying for it.
The thing about subscription stacking is that nobody adds it up. Software companies know this. Ten dollars a month feels like nothing. Twenty dollars a month feels like nothing. Annual renewals are the sneakiest version — they hide in your inbox, hit your card once, and you forget about them for another twelve months.
You sign up because the free tier ran out, or a friend recommended it, or you needed one specific feature for one specific project, and you tell yourself you’ll cancel later. But you don’t cancel later. Because canceling means logging in, finding the billing page, going through the retention flow, clicking “are you sure” three times. So the charge keeps coming. And another one. And another one. Until your “I just need a few tools” stack is quietly costing you more than your phone bill.
I want to be honest about something, though. I’m not anti-subscription. Canva earns every penny — I open it every day, I’d be lost without it. Google storage is the backbone of how I run my business. Some software genuinely deserves a recurring relationship.
The problem isn’t subscriptions. The problem is forgotten subscriptions, and software that costs more in friction than it earns in value.
QuickBooks deserves its own paragraph here. I had it. The Etsy integration was genuinely nice — every transaction flowing in automatically, neat and tidy. But the rest of it? A nightmare. A platform built for accountants, sold to solopreneurs, with an interface that assumes you know what “reconciliation” and “chart of accounts” and “journal entries” mean. I would log in, get instantly overwhelmed, log out. Pay another month. Log in. Get overwhelmed. Log out. Eventually I canceled it.
And the Etsy integration I thought I needed? Here’s the thing. Last year, my Etsy transaction export was over fifteen thousand rows. Fifteen thousand. For one sticker business.
I do not need fifteen thousand rows in my bookkeeping software. I do not need to see every $0.20 transaction fee or every $4.50 shipping label individually. I need to know: how much did I actually make this month, and how much did I spend in the categories that matter — shipping, fees, marketing.
That’s four numbers. Four lines. One end-of-month entry.
That’s what I built into Maryn. At the end of each month, I pull the four numbers I actually need from Etsy’s stats — net income, shipping, fees, marketing — and enter them. Two minutes. Not fifteen thousand rows. Not journal entries. Not a chart of accounts. My accountant gets a clean summary at tax time, and I get my evenings back.
When I started building Maryn, the price was the first thing I knew.
$197, once. Not because it was a marketing decision. Because I had just spent years bleeding dollars on tools that were either too complicated for one person, or built for one project I’d already abandoned, or quietly renewing in the background while I forgot they existed. I didn’t want to build another monthly drip. I wanted to build the opposite.
If you use Maryn for one year, it’s already cheaper than QuickBooks Self-Employed. If you use it for five years, you’ve saved enough to take a real vacation. And the subscriptions you genuinely love — your Canva, your Google, the tools that earn their keep — keep doing what they do. Maryn is just one less recurring charge. Pay once. Open it tomorrow, next year, in 2031. It’ll still work. It’ll still be yours.
I’m not asking you to cancel everything. I’m asking you to open your bank statement this week and add it up. The number will probably surprise you. Some of those charges will be earning their keep. Some of them will be Coursera courses you never finished.
That math is worth doing.
— Jen