List everything you're subscribed to. We'll show you the monthly bleed, the 10-year total, and what that money could have become instead.
Subscription pricing is engineered to be evaluated monthly and forgotten. $8.99 here, $12.99 there — each one is a coffee. But subscriptions don't behave like coffees: they recur silently, they creep upward (streaming services have raised prices almost yearly), and they stack. The honest unit for a subscription is not its monthly price but its decade price — and this calculator shows you that number for your real list.
For the software you keep: there's a growing category of apps you can simply buy once — see our SaaS vs. ownership simulator for what renting software costs against owning it, and why we don't do subscriptions for the philosophy.
Everything is converted to a monthly amount (a yearly price ÷ 12, a weekly price × 52 ÷ 12), then yearly = monthly × 12 and ten years = monthly × 120. The "invested instead" figure is what that monthly amount would grow to if it earned 5% a year, compounded monthly, for ten years. That rate is an assumption, not a forecast.
| Subscription | Monthly | Yearly |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming | $15.49 | $185.88 |
| Music | $11.99 | $143.88 |
| Budgeting app | $9.08 | $108.96 |
| Cloud storage | $2.99 | $35.88 |
| Total | $39.55 | $474.60 |
Over ten years that is $4,746, and about $6,141 if the same money were invested at 5% instead. Four ordinary subscriptions come to nearly $475 a year.
Surveys repeatedly find people underestimate their subscription spend by 2–3×. Most people who list everything — streaming, music, cloud storage, apps, gym, delivery memberships, software — land somewhere between $50 and $250 per month. The 10-year figure is usually the shock: $100/month is $12,000 a decade, before any price rises.
It is what the same money could have grown to if invested instead — this calculator assumes a 5% average annual return, compounded monthly. It is an illustration of scale, not financial advice or a prediction.
Sort by the yearly figure, not the monthly one — $12.99/month reads as trivial until you see $155.88/year. Then ask of each: did I use this in the last 30 days, and would I sign up again today at this price? Anything that fails both is a cancel.
No. The list is processed entirely in your browser and disappears when you close the page. Nothing is uploaded.
Look through the last two months of bank and card statements for recurring charges, including small annual ones, and check the subscriptions section of your phone’s app store account. The ones you forgot are the point of the exercise.
Usually, per month, but only if you would use the service for the whole year. Add both options to the calculator and compare the yearly totals; YNAB, for example, is $109 a year against $179.88 for twelve monthly payments.