Just found out my CAD subscription went up 40% over 3 years without me noticing

I was going through old invoices yesterday and nearly spit out my coffee. Back in 2020 I was paying $220 a month for my drafting software license and now it's over $300. That's almost $100 more every single month and I never even questioned it because they auto-renew. I work at a small firm in Austin and we've got 5 seats so that's like $500 extra per month total just disappearing. How many of you have actually checked your subscription bills lately? Are there any cheaper alternatives that work for commercial drafting work?

2 comments

2 Comments

olivia_wilson16d ago

Man that's exactly the kind of thing companies bank on you not noticing. Auto renew is a total trap for small businesses because nobody has time to dig through old invoices every month. It's the same everywhere now - my internet bill went up $15 a month over two years and I only caught it because I was switching providers. They just slowly bump it up hoping you won't bother to check or switch. It feels like subscription creep is built into every service now, from software to gym memberships to streaming. You basically have to schedule a yearly audit of everything you pay for or you're just throwing money away.

kelly.robin16d ago

Haha @olivia_wilson is totally right - they're basically running a "see how much we can get away with" experiment on all of us. My software did the same thing and I only noticed when my credit card company flagged a "large recurring charge" and I was like oh yeah that's just my work tools slowly draining my account.