Recurring Subscription Cost report
What each subscription costs on its billing cycle and what it has cost since you started paying for it.
Last updated
Subscriptions are easy to lose track of because nobody has to do anything for them to keep charging. The Recurring Subscription Cost report lists them together with what they cost, so the total is in front of you rather than spread across a year of invoices.
Reading the table
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Category | The subscription's category |
| Subscription | Its name |
| Start Date | When billing began |
| Recurring Cost | The amount on each billing cycle |
| Total Cost To Date | Everything paid since the first billing event |
| Status | Whether the subscription is currently active |
Total Cost To Date is the column worth understanding. It is not the recurring cost multiplied out; it is built from the billing events recorded on each subscription's timeline. So if you added licenses in March and the price rose in July, the total reflects what you actually paid across each of those periods rather than assuming today's price always applied.
That is also why the column depends on your record keeping. Each time a subscription changes — more seats, a new rate, a renegotiated renewal — record it with Update Billing from the actions button, as described on the managing subscriptions page. A subscription whose price changed but was never updated will show a total based on the old figure.
Sorting
Every column sorts. Sorting by Recurring Cost puts your most expensive subscriptions at the top, which is usually the fastest way to find what is worth renegotiating. Sorting by Total Cost To Date instead surfaces the long-running, quietly expensive ones: a cheap subscription nobody has questioned for four years can easily have cost more than an expensive one bought last quarter.
Subscriptions with a lifetime purchase or free billing type have no recurring charge, so they carry no recurring cost here. The dashboard also has a subscription cost card that charts the same spending over time if you want the trend rather than the table.