You know that moment when you have an idea so simple, you wonder why you didn't think of it years ago? I just had one of those while staring at yet another full-price subscription renewal.
Every year, Black Friday comes around with amazing deals on all those digital tools and services I use daily. And every year, somehow, I completely forget about them until after they're gone. JetBrains All Products Pack, MongoDB Atlas, those AI assistants - they all run great Black Friday specials that I consistently miss.
So, I finally did something about it. I just created a recurring Google Calendar event for October titled "Black Friday Subscription Watch List". That's it. That's the whole hack.
The plan is simple: Throughout the year, whenever I get a renewal notification and think "I should've waited for a deal," I'll just open that calendar event and add the name to the description. No fancy system, no spreadsheets, just a simple list.
Come October, Google will remind me to check these services for deals. By Black Friday, I should have a practical list of subscriptions I actually want to save money on.
The best part? It takes no extra effort. We're all going to check our calendar notifications anyway, might as well make them useful.
I'll report back next year on how this experiment goes. Maybe it'll save me hundreds, maybe it'll just be another notification I dismiss. Either way, it's simple enough to try.
P.S. Sure, I could build something more complex to track all this. But sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.