Subscription Cost Calculator

The total is only as good as the list, and the list is where people go wrong. Read 12 months of statements rather than the last one. Annual renewals appear exactly once a year and they are the charges nobody remembers, so a single month of statements reliably undercounts. Do the same for every card and account, including any card you have since replaced, because a subscription that failed to charge is not the same as a subscription that was cancelled.

Then check the app stores separately. Apple, Google and Amazon each bill in their own right, and a subscription bought inside an app shows on your statement as a line from that store rather than from the service, so it is easy to see the charge without recognising what it is for. Each has a subscriptions screen that lists everything currently active and its renewal date. Anything you cannot identify from the store listing, search your email for the receipt.

Watch for the two charges that look like one. Bundles that include a service you also pay for directly are common, and Amazon Prime is the usual example: the full membership at £8.99 a month already carries Prime Video, so paying £6.99 for Prime Video standalone on top of it is £83.88 a year for nothing. Mobile contracts and bank accounts that bundle a streaming or music tier create the same overlap.

Subscriptions are priced monthly because a monthly price is the one that sounds small, and that framing works. The annual column is the correction. A single £12.99 streaming service is £155.88 a year, which is a decision most people would think about carefully if it arrived as one bill and think about not at all when it arrives as 12 of them.

The 5-year column pushes that further, and it is deliberately blunt. It assumes today's prices hold, which they will not, so treat it as a floor rather than a forecast. Even so, the arithmetic is the point: the £25.98 a month of one streaming service and one music account is £1,558.80 across 5 years, and the heavy household row above reaches £7,316.40. Those are numbers you would compare against something else you want. A monthly price never invites that comparison.

The per-day figure does the opposite job, and it is worth ignoring when you are deciding whether to cancel. A stack of £70.95 a month is £2.33 a day, which sounds like nothing. That is the framing the pricing page wants you to use. It is a fair way to compare one subscription against a coffee and a terrible way to decide whether you need six of them.

If you would rather aim the money somewhere, the savings goal calculator turns a cancelled subscription into a date on a target, and the compound interest calculator shows what the same amount does invested instead of spent. For the wider picture, the net worth calculator puts recurring outgoings next to what you own.

Once the total is on screen, sort by size rather than by annoyance. The instinct is to cancel the small irritating ones, but the stack table shows where the weight sits: the step from £51.96 to £70.95 a month is mostly a second streamer and a family music plan, not the £0.99 storage tier that people cancel first and then re-subscribe to when their phone stops backing up.

Tier changes usually beat cancellations. Moving one streaming service from its ad-free tier to its ad-supported one saves £84.00 a year and you keep the catalogue. Family and duo music plans work the other way round: £21.99 for up to six accounts is cheaper than three people paying £12.99 each, so the saving there comes from consolidating rather than downgrading.

Rotation is the other lever, and it is the one the annual column argues for. Streaming catalogues are watched in bursts, so subscribing for the two months you have something to watch and cancelling after costs a sixth of the year's price. On the £5.99 ad tier that is barely worth the effort. On a £18.99 premium tier it is £189.90 a year, which is real money. The one thing to check before rotating is whether cancelling loses anything you cannot get back, such as a legacy price you would not be offered again.

Gym memberships deserve their own look, because they are the category where the price and the usage are least connected. A £22.99 membership used twice a week is roughly £2.64 a visit, and used twice a month it is £11.50. Check the notice period and the joining fee before switching, since a joining fee charged again wipes out several months of the saving. The rest of the household and day-to-day tools sit in the everyday calculators category, and the electricity cost calculator covers the other recurring bill that is easy to underestimate.