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Phones, apps & storage

Subscription Cost Calculator

Small monthly charges are designed not to register. This adds them up per year, projects five years including typical price rises, and separates the ones you use from the ones you merely keep paying for. The list stays in your browser.

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Service Price Cycle Per month Per year Use

Why monthly pricing works so well on us

A subscription is priced against the wrong comparison on purpose. $9.99 a month reads as less than a takeaway coffee; the same charge is $119.88 a year and $599 over five years, which reads as a decision. Nothing about the service changes between those two framings, only which number you are shown.

Eight subscriptions at an average of $11 a month — a completely ordinary household load in 2026 — is $1,056 a year. Very few people can name all eight from memory, which is the single most reliable sign that the model is working as designed.

Annual plans and what they really save

Most services discount an annual plan by 15–20%, which is a genuine saving on anything you would have kept for a year anyway. The cost is optionality: you pay up front and lose the ability to leave in month three. For services you have used weekly for over a year, take the annual plan. For anything newer than that, the monthly premium is the price of being able to walk away, and it is usually worth paying.

The audit that actually works

  1. Read the last three months of card and app-store statements. Not memory — memory reliably misses two or three.
  2. List every charge here with an honest usage frequency. "Rarely" is not a failure, it is the finding.
  3. Cancel everything marked rarely, today. Nearly all of them run to the end of the paid period, so cancelling costs nothing now.
  4. Convert the daily and weekly ones to annual plans. That is where the 15–20% is.
  5. Set a calendar reminder for eleven months out. Annual renewals are silent by design and arrive when you have forgotten they exist.
Free trials. The business model assumes you forget. Cancel the moment you start one — access almost always runs to the end of the trial anyway, so cancelling immediately costs you nothing and removes the charge entirely.

Questions people ask about this

How much do people spend on app subscriptions?

A typical household in 2026 carries six to twelve active subscriptions averaging around $11 a month, which is $800 to $1,500 a year. Most people underestimate their own total by roughly half when asked, because the charges are individually small, arrive on different dates, and are spread across a card, an app store account, and a bank direct debit.

Are annual subscription plans worth it?

For anything you have used weekly for more than a year, yes — the discount is usually 15–20% and the commitment costs you nothing you were going to use anyway. For a service you started this month, no. The monthly premium buys the ability to cancel in week three, and that option is worth more than the discount on something unproven.

How do I find subscriptions I forgot about?

Three places, in this order: your app store account's subscription list, three months of card statements read line by line, and your email searched for "receipt" and "renewal". Memory misses two or three every time. Annual subscriptions are the most commonly missed, because they charge once and stay quiet for eleven months.

Where these numbers come from

Rates on this page were last checked against the published price lists on . Grading companies change fees and pause tiers without notice — confirm the total on the submission form before you pay.