Yearly subscription cost

The sum nobody does

A subscription at 9.99 a month looks like nothing: it's less than a pizza. But twelve times that is 119.88 a year, and anyone with five running — music, video, cloud, gym, an app — is spending almost six hundred a year without ever having decided it in one go. The monthly price is designed to look small: here you look at it with the right unit, the year.

The daily cost matters too

The daily figure is useful for the opposite question: do I use it enough to justify it? A subscription at 12 a month costs 39 cents a day; if you open it twice a month, each time costs you six. It's the sum that quickly settles which subscriptions to keep, far better than the feeling «it's only a little».

Three things to check before it renews

The price after the promotion. «Half price for the first year» offers renew at full price, and renewal is nearly always automatic: the real cost is the second year's.

The annual plan. Almost every service discounts it by about two months: if you already know you'll keep it, paying once a year costs less. If you're not sure, monthly is dearer but you can stop whenever you like, and the difference is the price of that freedom.

The renewal date. It's the only day when the decision can really be made: note it down somewhere, because no service warns you with the enthusiasm it used to invite you to sign up.

Nearby tools

To put all your spending into one picture there is 50/30/20 budget, and to put aside a sum by a date Savings goal. If you're comparing a subscription with a one-off purchase, the arithmetic over the years is done by Inflation calculator, which says what a cost spread over time is really worth.