A once-a-year subscription cleanup is better than nothing, but it means a forgotten $15/month charge can run for eleven months before anyone notices — $165 that quietly disappeared. A short monthly pass catches the same thing in weeks, not months.

What the review actually involves

It doesn't need to be exhaustive. Three questions, applied to your list of recurring items: Did anything new get added this month that you don't recognize? Is there anything you haven't used in the last 30 days? Did any price change without you noticing? That's the whole review — most months, the answer to all three is "no," and it takes under five minutes to confirm.

Why monthly beats "whenever I think of it"

Reviews that don't have a fixed cadence tend not to happen at all — there's never an obvious trigger to prompt one. Attaching it to something that already happens monthly, like checking your number at the start of the month, gives the review a natural home instead of relying on remembering to do it.

The goal isn't vigilance for its own sake. It's making sure that every recurring charge is still something you'd actively choose today, not just something that's still running because canceling it never made it onto a to-do list.