Stopped buying paper towels 8 months ago. Switched to rags cut from old t-shirts. haven't looked back once.
I was going through a roll of paper towels every week and a half, sometimes faster. Not even doing anything crazy with them, just the usual stuff, wiping counters, cleaning up spills, drying hands. At maybe $3-4 a roll that's somewhere around $100 a year minimum just on paper towels which when I actually did that math felt genuinely embarrassing.
What I did: I had a pile of old t-shirts that were too worn to donate, just soft cotton, no use to anyone. Cut them into roughly palm-sized squares with scissors, took maybe 20 minutes total. Threw them in a little basket under the sink. When one gets dirty it goes into a small bin I keep nearby, every few days I throw the whole bin in with a regular laundry load.
Eight months later I've spent exactly zero dollars on paper towels. The rags are still going strong, actually softer now from washing, and I have like 30 of them so I'm never running low. Cleaning up a greasy pan? rag. Spilled coffee? rag. Cat knocked over her water bowl at 7am? rag.
The only thing I still buy paper towels for occasionally is if I'm dealing with something truly disgusting that I don't want to put in the laundry, which is maybe once every two months. So one roll lasts me basically a season now. I know this is one of those tips that sounds obvious once you hear it but I genuinly didn't think about it for years. If you have old t-shirts sitting around doing nothing, just cut them up. Takes twenty minutes and pays for itself before the week is out.