A 5-minute read on a one-week test that puts a real number on the subscription and the supplement you keep meaning to cancel.
Sunk cost logic wears two outfits and answers to two different names. In a brokerage account it sounds like “it’ll come back eventually.” In a gym contract it sounds like “I already paid for the year.” Underneath, both charges renew for the same reason: canceling takes more effort than not canceling, and effort loses to autopay almost every time.
The test runs for seven days. For the subscription, log every time you actually open it: watch something, use a feature, log in at all. For the supplement, log every dose and jot down, in a word or two, whether you noticed anything: energy, sleep, a symptom, nothing. At the end of the week, divide the monthly charge by the number of real uses or doses.
The number itself is rarely dramatic. Fourteen dollars for one watched episode. Thirty dollars split across seven doses that produced no noticeable difference from the six before them. What matters is the question that number forces: would you pay that per-use price again, today, with no sunk cost attached to the answer.
This works because it replaces a vague ongoing decision with one specific, dated one. “I should probably cancel that” can survive years without ever getting resolved. A charge priced out to twenty-two dollars a use, sitting in front of you on day seven, gets an answer within the hour.
Run the same log on a subscription and a supplement in the same week, and a pattern tends to show up: the charges that survive the math are rarely the ones you’d have guessed walking in.
P.S. Tomorrow: what switching health insurance plans mid-year actually costs, and why the sign-up bonus never mentions it.
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