Veault Blog
Financial
Subscriptions
By:
Léon van Leeuwen
Last updated:
November 7, 2025
After a death, family members face a mountain of paperwork. But apart from the usual matters (bank, insurance), there's a new, unseen expense: the "digital inheritance" of monthly subscriptions.
What happens to a Netflix account? A Spotify subscription? The software that gets charged each month? The newspapers and magazines?
These are the "dormant subscriptions." They keep quietly going and deduct money each month from an account, sometimes for months, leading to unnecessary costs and a lot of frustration.
Preventing this is one of the greatest practical gifts you can give your loved ones. Here's the checklist you can start working on today.
The checklist: What subscriptions do you have?
The biggest issue is invisibility. Your family simply doesn’t know what needs to be canceled. Go through these categories and make an overview.
1. Entertainment:
Streaming Video: Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Videoland, etc.
Streaming Music: Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer.
Other: Lotteries, sports clubs, gaming subscriptions (Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus).
2. Media & Information:
Digital Newspapers: NRC, Volkskrant, De Telegraaf.
Magazines: Both physical and digital (e.g., Readly).
Software: Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, antivirus software, specific (work) software.
3. Household & Utilities:
Basic: Gas, water, electric (energy supplier).
Connectivity: Internet provider (Ziggo, KPN), mobile phone.
Insurances: (This is a large category on its own: health, car, home contents, liability).
4. E-commerce & Delivery:
Memberships: Bol Select, Amazon Prime.
Meal Boxes: HelloFresh, Marley Spoon.
The problem: A list alone is not enough
Suppose you create a perfect Excel list. You save it in "My Documents". This doesn’t solve three problems not:
Findability: How do your survivors find this specific file on your computer?
Access: How do they log in to your computer to find the file? (See our blog about Apple access).
Information: The list says "Volkskrant", but what’s the customer number? Which email address was used? Your partner still has to spend hours on the phone with helpdesks.
The solution: A shareable vault
You don’t need a list. You need a manual for your survivors.
The guided process from Veault is specifically designed to solve this problem. Instead of coming up with a list yourself, we ask you the questions.
"Do you have a Netflix account?"
"Do you have a Spotify account?"
"Who is your energy supplier?"
For each item you add, we provide you with simple fields to fill in the crucial information that your survivors really need:
Service: Netflix
Username/Email: [your-email@gmail.com]
Customer Number (optional): [123456]
Conclusion: Replace chaos with a checklist
You don’t even need to share your passwords to solve this. You just need to provide an overview.
By spending half an hour today placing this list in a central, shareable vault like Veault, you save your loved ones hours of frustration and hundreds of euros in unnecessary costs. It is the ultimate practical act of care.
Prevent your legacy from becoming an administrative burden. A good overview of your subscriptions is a crucial part of your digital planning.
Read more about managing your entire digital legacy.
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