Guide
The real yearly cost of your subscriptions, and what the money could become
Subscriptions are designed to be forgettable. A streaming service here, cloud storage there, a gym, a news site, a music plan: each costs little, each renews itself, and together they quietly take a meaningful share of income. Seeing the total once, in a single list on a yearly scale, is often enough to start trimming. This page does the arithmetic and ranks the plans so that you can see which ones account for the money.
Entering the plans
Write one plan per line with commas: its name, the cost of one payment and how often it is billed. The period can be written as week, month, quarter or year, and short forms such as m, q, y and w are understood. A name may contain commas because the last two parts are always the cost and the period. The page shows a message with the line number if a line is incomplete.
Putting them on one scale
Each plan is converted to a yearly cost: a weekly charge is paid 52 times, a monthly one 12 times, a quarterly one 4 times and a yearly one once. The total of these is the yearly cost, and dividing by 12 gives the average monthly cost, while dividing by 365 gives the daily cost. This is how a modest-looking monthly list becomes a figure you can compare with your income or your savings.
A worked example
The sample has five plans: streaming video at 649 a month, music at 119 a month, cloud storage at 2,900 a year, a gym at 1,800 a month and a news site at 520 a quarter. Their yearly costs are 7,788, 1,428, 2,900, 21,600 and 2,080, a total of 35,796. That is an average of 2,983 a month and about 98.07 a day, or 3,57,960 over ten years. The ranking shows that the gym accounts for 60.3% of the total and streaming for 21.8%, with cloud storage at 8.1% and the news site and music following.
The invested comparison
The last result takes the monthly average and asks what it would grow to if invested at the start of every month at a return you set, 6% a year over ten years by default. The answer for the sample is 4,91,296. It is a way to compare scales, not a recommendation to cancel everything: a gym that you use four times a week may be well worth 21,600, and the figure is not a prediction because returns vary.
Using the list
Go through the table from the top. For each plan ask whether you used it in the last month and whether a cheaper tier or a shared family plan would do. Check for annual plans renewing soon, and for free trials that turned into paid ones. Cancelling or downgrading one large item usually saves more than ten small ones, which is why the ranking is by yearly cost.
Limits
The page cannot see your bank account, so it only knows what you type. Price rises, taxes on top of the listed price and plans that vary month to month are not handled. For irregular costs, enter an average.
Related tools
- 50/30/20 Budget Calculator shows which part of your income the wants category, where most subscriptions sit, should take.
- Percentage Calculator turns the yearly total into a share of income.
- Net Worth Calculator shows the assets the saved money could add to.
- Emergency Fund Calculator gives a first use for money freed by cancelling.
Checked against the current version of the Subscription Cost Calculator on .