Managing your own forgotten monthly charges means checking your app-store subscriptions and credit-card statements, then narrowing down the list as necessary. But you might also want to reconsider the approach altogether, especially if you have a few willing partners: Splitting the bill with people who use family plans can save you money, even if you don’t have family.
Family plans typically offer a discounted group rate that gets cheaper with more people. The typical head-count cap is four or six.
Many services, such as Hulu and Spotify, stipulate that members must live in the same household. For example, sharing an account with a child in college would technically be a violation of those Terms of Services. And while Netflix login sharing has a long tradition, the streaming giant recently said it plans to ask accounts with unauthorized users to pay more.
Here are some services that allow you to share your plan with others you don’t live with without breaking the rules. If you can accommodate multiple people, these group plans can save you money—up to 75% in one case.
share account
Plan: Amazon Prime Delivery, Video & Other Benefits
Cost: $15 per month; $139 per year
You can share Prime benefits, including expedited delivery and Prime Video streaming, with Amazon Domestic. This includes two adults and four juveniles (ages 13 to 17) who are not required to live in the same residence. Up to four young children can be paired but cannot shop on Amazon.
Adults and teens have their own Amazon logins, but they share payment methods for shopping and digital content. Adult Amazon household members cannot view each other’s purchase history or order information. The service allows up to three simultaneous Prime Video streams and two simultaneous streams of the same content within the same Amazon account.
If you share Prime with a friend, it’s probably best to add multiple credit cards to the shared digital wallet. Make sure this is someone you trust. And just be aware that if you choose to leave the shared plan, you can’t join another for 180 days.
Plan: Apple One and iCloud+Storage & Services
Cost: $15 to $30 per month; $1 to $10 per month
Apple One, launched in 2020, is a bundle of services including iCloud storage, Music, TV+, Fitness+, Arcade and more.
With Family Sharing, you can split iCloud storage or Apple One with up to five others, as long as all members live in the same country. iCloud+ offers levels ranging from 50 gigabytes to 2 terabytes of storage. All members can see how much storage each person is using, but they can’t see each other’s photos or other files stored in iCloud. Start a family group by going to Settings, tapping on your name, then going to Family Sharing.
If purchase sharing is enabled, everyone can access any apps or media purchased by other family members. The caveat is that an adult, the family organizer, pays for the purchase. There is a solution: Members can purchase an Apple gift card and add a balance to their Apple ID to pay for App Store purchases separately.
Plan: Google Onecloud Storage and Services
Cost: $20 to $250 per year
Google One has expanded storage capacity for Photos, Gmail and Drive. Plans ranging from 100 GB to 2 TB can be shared with up to five others. Family members don’t have access to each other’s files, but they can see how much storage space other people are using. Members must reside in the same country as the family manager and must not have been in any other family group in the past year. You must share the same payment method, and you will have the option to share digital purchases. Create a family group at family.google.com and sign in with your Google Account.
There’s a problem: If you’re using a family group with YouTube TV, all members must live in the same household.
Plan: 1Password and Dashlane Password Manager
Cost: For 1 password, $18 per year for individuals and $30 for six accounts; For Dashlane, $60 annually for individuals, $90 per year for six accounts
These services remember all your passwords and generate secure new passwords. I love both 1Password and Dashlane, which offer family plans at huge discounts.
1Password Organizer can recover accounts for family members if they forget their master password. Each member has a private vault, but can add communal logins to a shared vault. If you need more than six accounts, each additional account will cost an additional $1 per month.
Dashlane costs more but adds extras like a virtual private network (VPN) for private browsing.
Plan: Visible Phone Service
Cost: $40 per month for individuals; $25 per month for four or more members
Most cellular providers don’t require family-plan members to live together, but Visible, a provider owned and operated by Verizon, is unusual in that members pay for their own service individually. The most affordable Party Pay plan ($25 per month) covers a party of four or more members. Everyone must pay on time; Whoever does not, is expelled from the party. If the group becomes less than four people, everyone has to pay more. Can’t find enough willing friends? There is an official forum to find a group to join.
Visible’s prices for unlimited data and calling are cheaper than Verizon’s own plans, which start at $35 per month. Catch? Visible will not work abroad. You have to use local sim card. There is no number to call for customer service; You can only chat through the app or website. Mobile hot-spot speeds are capped at the slow 5 megabits per second and, like Verizon’s entry-level 5G plan, slow data speeds when the network is congested.
split the bill
As with all the plans discussed above, the first step is to get people to share. Second is getting them all to pay their dues.
Fuse is an app that simplifies splitting by up-front the cost of the subscription, then automatically charges everyone their share from their bank accounts. You don’t have to be that friend who always annoys everyone for Venmo.
It works like a shared debit card: The Fuse app generates a card number that can be added as a payment method to the subscription service. In the Fuse app, you can divide equally or in the ratio that best matches your situation. It’s free to use, and Fuse isn’t trying to sell your data. (The company makes its revenue from interchange fees charged to merchants, similar to credit cards.)
There’s also a low-tech solution: Group members can set up bill payments through their banks to automatically mail checks to the primary account owner. You may have to deal with depositing checks, but at least you can avoid those awkward Venmo requests.