Our love for data is very strong. It is so strong that the wireless carriers are almost doubling down on unlimited data. Rather than committing to unlimited data, try and learn more about your favorite apps. You can easily cut down your data usage with some easy tweaks and find a data plan which suits you better. This will have a direct effect on your monthly bill. Following are the things you need to know and keep in mind, in order to optimize your data usage.

Know how much data you use
Your phone already keeps a log of the data you’ve used. On average, an individual would use somewhere around 3GB of data per month, but nowadays the figure is close to 15GB a month. To check your data usage on an Android device, first go to “Settings,” then “Data usage.” There you’ll be able to see your total monthly usage. You can modify this range to align it with your billing cycle. On iOS devices such as iPhone and iPad, the same information will be in “Settings”, under “Cellular.”  If you’ve never set a range to your date, it will display your data usage from the start of the current month. You can also click “Reset Statistics” to start tracking your usage from a specific date.

Calculate how much data your apps use daily
You should calculate how much data streaming services use. As per reports, streaming 30 minutes of video per day at best quality on any of the social media or streaming services apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Prime, Youtube or Netflix adds up to more than 5GB of data in a month. Similarly, streaming music at high quality for an hour a day eventually adds up to almost 2GB in 30 days. This can be reduced by changing the streaming quality to a lower resolution. This will have a significant impact on your data usage.

Adjust your usage
With minor changes in your apps’ behavior and your own, you will be able to cut down the amount of data you use each month. You can turn off some apps from your settings menu so that they don’t use data at all. Or, you can modify the app settings to reduce your data usage without altering how you use your phone. You will have to do this with each app, but if you want, you can only focus on the ones that take up the most data.

Revisiting your plan
Once you’ve successfully made alterations to your apps’ behavior and your own, you will be able to accurately determine how many gigabytes you need. It will be better to wait for a month or two for your usage to reflect. If your data usage is below by a margin in your current plan’s limits, then you should consider switching the plan or your network provider. Each wireless company has its own plans. Remember to ask for features like unlimited video or music streaming, before finalizing a plan. This will help you save some bucks without losing out on the browsing experience.