Key Takeaway
Your digital life grows silently — subscriptions, accounts, cloud storage, domains. If something happens to you, nobody knows it exists. A one-hour audit and a simple list shared with a trusted person can prevent your digital life from disappearing.
A couple of days ago, I was working as usual, and in the evening, I decided to cancel my subscription to n8n. It is a good service, but it is no longer relevant for me. I opened it, checked the details, clicked Cancel, and at that moment a thought crossed my mind.
How many subscriptions like this do I actually have? The ones I signed up for at some point, used for a while, and then forgot about.
How Do You Even Find That Out?
I decided to start with the simplest approach. I opened my email and searched for the word "subscription." Then "receipt." Then "invoice."
After five minutes, I started to feel slightly uneasy.
I work with AI, and I use a lot of related services. Clouds. VPN. ChatGPT. Claude. Perplexity. Domains. Corporate email. Paid plugins. Canva. Tilda. And many more. Services I signed up for "just to try." Some were $5, some $10, some billed once a year. There were services I did not even remember anymore. But they were still there, quietly charging.
I decided not to stop and check everything. I opened my bank statement. Then Google subscriptions. Then PayPal. Then my domain list. After about an hour, I had a list of 13 subscriptions.
Honestly, I initially thought I would have maybe 7 or 8. Definitely not more than ten. It turned out to be almost twice that. Some of them I had not opened in months. One service I could not even remember why I had bought it.
The Total Amount Was Unpleasant
The total was not catastrophic. These were not hundreds of dollars per month. This is how subscriptions accumulate. Five dollars here, ten there. Everything seems reasonable until you see it all in one place.
Then another thought came to me. I looked at the list and wondered. If something happened to me tomorrow, who would even know about these subscriptions?
The answer was simple. No one.
My Wife Had No Idea
I do not hide anything from my wife. I do not have secret accounts. No hidden expenses. We just each have our own work, and somehow we have never asked each other about personal subscriptions. We both know about shared family subscriptions like music or movies. But professional ones? No one ever asked. And I never mentioned them.
I realized my wife has no idea what subscriptions I have, what services I use, where my files are, where the cloud storage is, where my domains are, where my notes are, where my projects are, where half of my digital life actually exists.
So I asked her.
"Do you know what services I use?" No. "Do you know where my work files are?" No. "Do you know what subscriptions I have?" No. "Do you know how many?" No.
It was a strange conversation. Not dramatic. Not alarming. Just slightly awkward. Because it turned out there is a whole layer of my life that nobody knows about except me.
These Were Not Just Subscriptions
I looked at the list again. These were not just subscriptions. These were pieces of my life. And other people were connected to them too. My clients.
Cloud storage with working documents. A notes service with ideas. AI tools I use every day. Project domains. Token payments for AI agents. And a lot more.
I realized that if these services were shut down, part of what I have been building for years would disappear. And nobody would even know it existed.
The Average Person Has Over 100 Online Accounts
Then I started reading about this topic. I found that the average person has more than 100 online accounts. It sounds excessive, but once you start counting, it makes sense. Email, social media, services, purchases, clouds, apps, test registrations. They accumulate over the years.
We do not think of them as something important. But at some point, you realize they contain documents, ideas, photos, work, projects, and access to everything else.
Email becomes the key to your entire life.
Digital Assets Are Silent
My digital life had grown on its own. Quietly. Without a plan. Without structure. Without any understanding of who, besides me, even knows it exists.
We are used to thinking in physical terms. Apartment. Documents. Bank account. But most of our lives no longer have a physical form. They exist in services. In accounts. In cloud storage. And they do not transfer automatically.
No friend or colleague will show up and say, "This probably belonged to your husband." Digital assets are silent. They are scattered not only across the internet, but also across flash drives, hard disks, old laptops, phones, voice recorders, cameras, CD and DVD disks. Old photos, family videos, a child's first steps and first words, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries.
What I Did About It
I ended up creating a single list. Which services could be canceled immediately. Which should be kept and passed to someone else. Where the most important files are stored. What can be deleted, and what should be preserved.
Then I showed the list to my wife. It took about twenty minutes. And it removed that strange feeling that appeared during the audit.
I did not become paranoid. I did not try to control everything. I did not shut down my accounts.
I just realized one thing. My digital life exists. And despite all the flexibility and advanced technology of digital assets, they turn out to be the most vulnerable if you do not think in advance about how they will be passed on.
I recommend doing a quick audit of your digital subscriptions and leaving instructions for someone close to you. Just in case.
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