I only went looking because two annual bills landed in the same week — a domain renewal and an SSL certificate, one after the other. My hosting runs about £8.50 a month, which is nothing, so the monthly bill had never once made me look twice. Annual charges are the opposite: they show up once, in a month you're not watching, and stay invisible the rest of the year.

So instead of clicking through the billing dashboard, I asked IONOS's Hosting API for the whole inventory — every domain, every certificate, every add-on — in one call. Six paid SSL certificates came back at around £30 a year each, plus a DNS Pro add-on I'd forgotten I was paying for. About £180 a year, staggered across the calendar so no single month ever looked wrong.

The API is like having your own personal search engine on one specific subset of your data — in this case, my hosting account. I don't need to search the web. I don't need to search my hard drive. I just need to get at that one particular bit of data quickly and check it.

Then I checked whether the certificates were doing anything at all. A curl and an openssl against each of the seven sites, and every one was already serving a Cloudflare or Let's Encrypt certificate — the free ones, provisioned automatically. The paid IONOS certificates weren't in the chain. The sites had sorted it themselves, and I'd carried on paying.

I haven't actually cancelled it yet — that's a job for this week. But I know what's going, and why.

Most of you don't have a hosting API to go poking around in — and you don't need one. The move underneath is simpler than the API: get your numbers out of the dashboard and into something you can actually read.

So here's the rule I'd give anyone. Use CSV files — comma-separated values, exported from your bank, your SaaS providers, wherever the money quietly leaves. Use the simplest bit of data you can get, and have your LLM scan it weekly.

— Jim