L'équipe Texto SMS Gratuit
9 October 2026 · 12 min read
Introduction: the figure nobody knows at home
Ask anyone: "how much does your household pay per month, in total, to be connected?" Nine times out of ten you will get the wrong answer. Always underestimated, sometimes by half.
The reason is simple: a household's digital spending never lands on a single line. There is the broadband box, debited on the 5th. The parents' two mobile plans, debited on the 8th and the 12th, sometimes with two different operators. The teenager's €7.99 plan, forgotten ever since it switched to direct debit. A €2 data SIM for a smartwatch nobody wears any more. A €2.99 cloud subscription to avoid the "storage almost full" message. A €5 TV add-on taken out during a World Cup. And a photo backup service bought through an app store, billed annually, and therefore perfectly invisible eleven months out of twelve.
According to Arcep, the average monthly bill per SIM card in France remains low — around fifteen euros excluding tax, falling almost continuously for ten years. But that per-line figure hides the key point: the number of lines has exploded. France now has more than 88 million SIM cards for 68 million inhabitants. In other words, the good news on pricing has been swallowed up by the sheer multiplication of subscriptions.
This guide is not a price comparison site. It is an audit method: how to establish your household's real cost in one hour, spot the duplicates, and cut what no longer serves a purpose — while respecting cancellation notice periods, which are the real difficulty.
Step 1: rebuild the exhaustive list (and it isn't in your head)
The first mistake is doing this inventory from memory. It doesn't work: the forgotten subscriptions are precisely the ones you don't remember.
The only reliable source is your bank statements over 13 months. Thirteen, not twelve: you need to catch the annual subscriptions, which are the most expensive and the most silent.
The practical method
- Download the PDF statements for the last 13 months from your online banking (plus those of the joint account, and those of the second account if there is one).
- Go through every line and note everything digital-related: operators, app stores, storage services, video platforms, antivirus, VPN, music services.
- Add a "who uses it" column and a "last actual use" column.
- Beware of misleading labels: in-app purchases often appear under the store's name, not the service's. A line reading "APPLE.COM/BILL €2.99" doesn't tell you whether it's storage, a game or a photo editing app.
For families doing this exercise once a year, a simple columnar accounts notebook kept in a drawer with the contracts works better than a spreadsheet nobody ever reopens: the physical constraint of writing it down builds the habit.
The table to fill in
| Subscription | Amount | Frequency | User | Used? | Commitment? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fibre broadband | €39.99 | monthly | household | yes | 12 months |
| Mobile plan 1 | €19.99 | monthly | parent | yes | no |
| Mobile plan 2 | €24.99 | monthly | parent | yes | 24 months |
| Teen plan | €7.99 | monthly | child | yes | no |
| Watch SIM | €2.00 | monthly | — | no | no |
| 200 GB cloud | €2.99 | monthly | parent | yes | no |
| Sports TV add-on | €5.00 | monthly | — | no | no |
| Antivirus | €59.99 | annual | household | ? | auto-renewal |
At the end of step 1, you have a total. That is usually the uncomfortable moment of the whole exercise.
Step 2: identify the four classic duplicates
Wasted money is almost never in the main subscription. It is in the overlaps.
Duplicate 1: mobile data paid for twice
This is the most common one. Two adults in the same household, each with a 100 or 150 GB plan, each using 12 to 20 GB a month — essentially because they are on Wi-Fi at the office and at home. Arcep puts average consumption at around 18 to 19 GB per month per card in 2026. Paying for two 100 GB allowances to use 35 GB in total is like buying a lorry to move two cardboard boxes.
Duplicate 2: cloud storage in triplicate
Many households simultaneously pay for a manufacturer's cloud (iCloud, Samsung), a mail or photo service cloud, and unknowingly have storage included in their broadband package. Before moving up to the next tier, check what your operator already includes — several fibre packages come with dozens of gigabytes of storage that are never activated.
A durable alternative for family photos, which grow indefinitely: an external SSD drive plugged in once a quarter costs about fifteen euros a year spread over five years, versus €36 a year for 200 GB of cloud. The cloud retains the advantage of protection against fire and theft; best practice is combining the two, not stacking three paid clouds.
Duplicate 3: TV and video services bought twice
The same streaming service can be billed directly by the platform and included in an operator bundle. This is very common after switching broadband packages: the operator adds the service to its plan, but the direct subscription keeps running. Nobody thinks to cancel the first one.
Duplicate 4: phantom "device" lines
Smartwatch, tablet, car GPS tracker, alarm with a SIM card, old backup phone. These lines cost €2 to €6 each. Taken individually they are painless — which is exactly why they survive for years. Three dormant lines at €4 add up to €144 a year.
Step 3: decide, but not blindly
Cutting for the sake of cutting leads to regrets and panic re-subscriptions at full price. Three questions are enough for each line.
Question 1: "what does it cost to reverse this?"
Cancelling a no-commitment mobile plan costs nothing and can be re-signed in twenty minutes, eSIM included. Cancelling fibre broadband, on the other hand, means termination fees (often €49), returning the equipment, and a new installation if you come back. The risk is not remotely the same.
So set your priorities: start with the reversible lines (add-ons, device SIMs, clouds) and finish with the heavyweight contracts.
Question 2: "does this line protect something?"
Some apparently useless subscriptions are in fact insurance policies. A second line with a rival operator, at €5, lets you keep calling emergency services and working on the day of a nationwide network outage — that is no gadget if you work from home. A dedicated line in a watch may be the only safeguard for an elderly parent who goes walking alone.
The opposite exists too: a paid "security" subscription that duplicates a function already built into the phone protects nothing at all.
Question 3: "am I paying for the comfort of not having to lift a finger?"
This is the heart of the matter. Extra cloud storage is very often the ransom paid for a photo clean-up never carried out. The unlimited weekend data add-on is the ransom for a badly configured hotspot. In these cases, one small technical action replaces a recurring expense for life.
Two highly profitable examples:
- A mesh Wi-Fi extender at €60 often removes the need to burn mobile data in the back room, and therefore the point of a large data plan.
- A USB microSD card reader lets you empty the photos from a phone and an old camera onto a drive in a single evening, cutting your cloud needs by two tiers.
Step 4: cancel cleanly, with the right notice periods
This is the step where audits most often fail, because the notice periods are not intuitive.
The rules to know in 2026
| Contract type | Notice / deadline | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| No-commitment mobile plan | 10 days maximum after the request (French Consumer Code) | Switching via your RIO code cancels automatically: don't also cancel yourself |
| Mobile plan with 24-month commitment | After 12 months: 25% of the remaining monthly payments | Before 12 months: 100% of the remaining monthly payments due |
| Broadband | 10 days, + contractual termination fees | Failing to return the equipment is charged dearly |
| Monthly add-on | End of the current month, generally | Check the anniversary date, not the calendar month |
| Annual subscription via an app store | Before the renewal date | Refunds after renewal are discretionary |
Three methodical habits:
- Cancel in writing and keep the proof. Even when the operator offers a button in your online account, take a screenshot with the date. In a dispute, that is your only evidence.
- Since the three-click cancellation law, contracts taken out online must be cancellable online, through an accessible and visible process. If you can't find it, that is a legitimate argument to raise with customer service and then with the electronic communications ombudsman, whose services are free.
- Watch the next two direct debits. An accepted cancellation does not mean the debit stops. Check your account over the following 60 days.
The special case of subscriptions taken out through an app store
These are the most annoying, because they don't appear with your operator. They are managed in the phone's settings, in the subscriptions section of the Apple or Google account. Carry out this check on every device in the household, including the children's tablets: that is where €4.99 subscriptions signed up for during a free trial lie hidden.
What the audit actually delivers
For households that do this exercise seriously, the savings almost always break down as follows:
- €5 to €12 a month: removing dormant lines and add-ons. Immediate gain, zero risk.
- €8 to €20 a month: resizing mobile plans to match actual usage, and bringing them in line with current offers. The gap between the package you have been paying for four years and the equivalent package sold today is considerable.
- €3 to €8 a month: de-duplicating storage and video services.
That means, at the low end, around twenty euros a month — €240 a year — without losing a single useful feature. At the high end, you go beyond €450 a year.
The real benefit is not the one-off saving. It is knowing, for the first time, what you pay and why. A household that knows its total reacts within a fortnight to a price increase; a household that doesn't discovers it eighteen months later.
Keeping the benefit: the two-appointments-a-year routine
An audit without follow-up decays within twelve months. Two dates in the diary are enough.
In January: re-read December's statement, line by line. That is the month when annual price increases most often appear. Useful reminder: if your contract is unilaterally modified, you have four months to cancel with no fees, no penalty and no notice period — a right set out in the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code, and one that almost every subscriber lets expire.
In June: a review before the summer, the time of year when roaming add-ons, holiday plans and temporary lines multiply — and never switch themselves off.
In between, one simple habit: every time you take out a digital subscription, note its anniversary date immediately. A family wall planner in the kitchen does this job better than a reminder app, because everyone can see it.
And for the paperwork
Keep these for the whole duration of the contract, then two years after cancellation: the original contract, the pricing terms, cancellation letters, delivery receipts and the three relevant bank statements. One expanding file folder per theme (telecoms, energy, insurance) settles the problem once and for all. It isn't glamorous, but it is what makes the difference in front of a customer service agent or an ombudsman: you produce a dated document, not a recollection.
In summary
- A household's digital cost is scattered across 7 to 10 direct debit lines: it can only be assessed from 13 months of bank statements.
- The savings come from duplicates (data, cloud, video, device lines), not from negotiating the main subscription.
- Cancel what is reversible first, then the contracts with exit fees.
- A plan with a commitment cancelled after 12 months costs only 25% of the remaining monthly payments: the sums are often worth doing.
- Two reviews a year, in January and in June, are enough to avoid ending up back where you started.
Sources: Arcep (electronic communications market observatories, monitoring of the SIM card base and data consumption), French Consumer Code (provisions on online cancellation and notice periods), French Postal and Electronic Communications Code (right of cancellation in the event of a contractual modification), Médiateur des communications électroniques.
