Scott Galloway’s subscription audit revealed an invisible US$34K (C$47K) Uber habit. Here’s what Canadians should check

Galloway has spent his career as a sharp, skeptical critic of how the tech industry squeezes money out of consumers, and he's done well for himself along the way. So it's a bit ironic how he could let his own subscriptions get so out of control.

But that's exactly the whole point. Big Tech has deliberately made it as easy as possible for consumers to spend money without even noticing. That US$34,000 (C$47,000) Uber bill didn't show up out of nowhere. It slowly crept up ride by ride, on autopilot.

And if it can happen to someone who's built a career pulling apart these business models, it can surely happen to anyone — including Canadians who think they have a solid grip on where their money is going.

The numbers say it's already happening to Canadians

Galloway's story hits close to home. Research shows Canadians aren't only susceptible to this problem of being over-subscribed — they may actually be among those most affected by it.

A 2024 survey by personal finance app Hardbacon found that the average Canadian holds eight recurring subscriptions while thinking they only have four (2). That's double the reality, and it gets more telling from there. Elsewhere in the survey, more than 66% of Canadians admit to having paid for a subscription they had completely forgotten about, and 73% say they signed up for a free trial they forgot to cancel before getting charged.

"This result shows how pernicious recurring subscriptions are from a budgetary standpoint, as few people know how many subscriptions they have or how much all these subscriptions cost them annually," noted Julien Brault, CEO of Hardbacon.

Even when Canadians try to correct the problem, the process works against them. More than half — 55% — say they've postponed unsubscribing because the process is too difficult, often requiring a phone call despite setting up the subscription entirely online (2).

That rub is deliberate: The companies Galloway called out in his campaign — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Paramount+, Meta, Uber, Netflix, OpenAI and X — have built their billing systems with a very specific goal in mind: Make it as easy as possible to start spending money and as annoying as possible to stop (3).

What the Canadian streaming picture looks like

According to a 2026 Couch Potato Report from Convergence Research, subscription revenue across more than 55 streaming services in Canada grew 15% to C$4.8 billion in 2025 (4). The average Canadian household paying for streaming now juggles nearly three subscriptions — meanwhile in 2024, the top streaming providers raised their prices for Canadian consumers by an average of 8% (4).

At the same time, a 2025 study commissioned by Roku found that nine in ten Canadian TV streamers are now using ad-supported tiers — a sign that household budgets are feeling the squeeze (5). And that's exactly what streaming companies are counting on: It's easier to downgrade than to cancel. For those who do neither, the bills keep climbing, often without anyone noticing until the annual cost has risen by double digits.

The math behind "It's only $20 a month"

One of the sharper points Galloway made in his campaign is how we think about a small monthly charge, and why we probably shouldn't think of them "small" to begin with. As Adweek reports, cancelling a single ChatGPT subscription at $240 a year translates to roughly $10,000 in lost market capitalization for the company (6). That's how much your $20 each month is truly worth to the company.

Reframing subscription behaviour that way reveals a lot about consumer psychology. A $20 monthly charge that barely registers to the owner may not sound like much. But it adds up fast when you look at it annually — and for the companies behind the charges, even small recurring payments are valuable. Many people never consciously decide to keep paying, they just never get around to stopping.

But the math works in your favour, too. Every subscription you cancel and forget about is money that can be put to building an emergency fund, beefing up a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) and/or a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP), or paying a grocery bill that has gotten a lot bigger than it was two years ago.

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Running the audit

Galloway's experience gives us all a practical lesson. He found duplicate services he'd forgotten about, subscriptions tied to devices he no longer owned and an easy spending he hadn't consciously budgeted for.

The financial audit most Canadians haven't run starts with four categories:

1. Streaming and entertainment
2. Artificial intelligence (AI) and software tools
3. Food delivery and ride-sharing services
4. Cloud storage

Ride-share and food delivery can hide some big surprises for users because the services are billed based on each transaction rather than fixed subscriptions. Flying under the billing radar like this makes them especially easy to go unnoticed. Galloway's Uber total illustrates how quickly those rides add up when you're not keeping score.

Add software tools, cloud storage tiers and delivery memberships and the monthly total piles up fast — often well past what you may have budgeted for when you signed up for each service.

But the good news is, you don't have to cancel everything. If you run an audit once a year like Galloway did, you'll eliminate duplicates and know how much ride-shares and delivery services have cost you over the past year. It's practicing basic financial hygiene.

"Just as Dry January offers an opportunity to scale back on alcohol," Galloway wrote in his campaign essay (7), giving yourself a subscription audit "provides a chance for people to reset their consumption patterns."

What Canadians can do right now

Galloway's experience is a useful nudge toward running your own subscription audit — here’s how you can get started:

Pull all your statements. Go back three months through your credit card and bank statements. Look for recurring charges, especially small ones below $15 or $20 that are easy to overlook. Check for charges on debit cards and accounts like PayPal, as well — the Hardbacon survey found that 27% of Canadians pay for subscriptions via Visa or Mastercard debit and 11% through PayPal (8).

Count what you actually use. Hardbacon's survey found that Canadians think they have roughly half the subscriptions they actually hold. List every recurring charge and ask yourself: Have I used this in the last 30 days?