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If you’re like me, you are paying for a ton of subscriptions you don’t even remember signing up for. Let’s make this the year of only having subscriptions that add to our lives. The digital services below are the best things you can subscribe to in 2026 if you want to actually improve yourself and your world, whether it’s through cutting your DoorDash bill, supporting your local bookstore, or finding obscure movies to impress your friends.
Best overall digital subscription of 2026: Apple One
While there’s no single digital service that everyone will like, Apple One comes close. Anyone with an iPhone (i.e., most phone users in the U.S.) will appreciate a single digital bundle that covers Apple Music, Apple TV+, Arcade, and extra iCloud storage. That’s streaming, gaming, and storage covered for $21.95 a month. Pro tip: The Family Plan includes six separate accounts for $27.95 a month, and your “family” could include anyone, so get some friends together to get the most out of Apple.
Best meal box service of 2026: Cook Unity
I’ve never understood meal boxes that deliver ingredients and instructions. If I wanted to cook, I wouldn’t be eating food out of a delivery box. Cook Unity gets it. The pitch is restaurant-quality meals created by star chefs like Esther Choi and Marcus Samuelsson for around $11 each, and the only “cooking” required is a little microwaving. If nothing else, this will save you a ton on DoorDash for those nights where you can’t be bothered to make dinner.
If you want to stay informed without doom-scrolling, and you want good recipes and better puzzles to boot, subscribe to the New York Times. An all-access subscription gives you access to the full New York Times archive (back to 1851!), NYT Cooking, daily crosswords, Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, and the 10,000-puzzle archive.
The best gift box of 2026: Bespoke Post
There are gift box services for all kinds of specific niches, but Bespoke Post casts a wider net by letting users choose what comes in their box every month. It’s heavily coded “man,” but that’s like half of everyone. One month, you can get high-end coffee supplies. The next, outdoor gear. If nothing catches your eye, you can just skip that month. If you want to open a present every month, all year, a subscription to Bespoke Post is for you.
The best education subscription of 2026: Masterclass
If you want to make your brain smarter, a subscription to Masterclass is way cheaper than grad school. This educational streaming service covers a wide range of subjects from Science to Acting to Business, and it includes extensive lectures from heavyweights in each field. If you want to learn how to make films, you can take a deep dive with Martin Scorsese, or take a music lessons from Timbaland or cooking lessons from Gordon Ramsay. A subscription unlocks the entire library, so you can learn as much or as little as you choose.
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The best entertainment subscription of 2026: Eternal Family
I’m going way into left field with this choice, but I bet you already know that you can stream NBC content on Peacock and what’s on Apple TV+. I bet you don’t know about Eternal Family, a streaming service that bills itself as the “hidden gem video store.” They don’t mean “hidden gems” that are actually widely known like The Prestige or something. This is the uncut stuff, like Heino Pars’ achingly beautiful 1983 stop motion film City of the Honey Makers (way better than The Bee Movie) or In the Dust of the Stars, a visionary science fiction film made behind the Iron Curtain in Romania in 1976. Every choice is a different strange delight.
The best audiobook subscription of 2026: Libro.fm
Libro.fm lets you listen to audiobooks while supporting your local independent bookstore instead of supporting a huge corporation that rhymes with “Schamazon.” Libro’s content is free of the Digital Rights Management of its main competitor, so you can listen to the books you buy however you like instead of locking yourself into a proprietary player. Libro’s firm anti-AI narration stance ensures you won’t be paying for robots to tell you bedtime stories, and you can choose which independent bookstore to support with Libro’s profit-sharing model.
Best outdoors/fitness subscription of 2026: AllTrails
When it comes to fitness subscriptions, services tend to focus on how you work out by letting you compare your workout to other people’s or keep track of exactly how many calories you burn. AllTrails reminds you why you work out in the first place. Its focus is on the discovery and exploration of the natural wonders around you. A premium subscription unlocks tools to discover beautiful trails and navigate them safely, like offline maps, terrain previews, and more, so you can get out of the gym and into the world.
