What do your subscriptions cost — together?

Small monthly, big yearly

The calculator does something your bank statement never bothers to: it converts every subscription to the same time frame so you can compare and total them honestly. You enter each recurring cost—streaming, apps, gym, cloud storage—and it multiplies monthly items by twelve, leaves annual ones as they are, then stacks everything into one yearly figure and projects it across several years. The point is that £7 or £12 a month never feels like a decision, so it never triggers scrutiny. Seen annually, the same charge suddenly asks to justify itself. Illustratively, you carry five services at an average of £11 each: that is £55 a month, which barely registers, but £660 a year and £3,300 over five years. Nothing about your spending changed; only the frame did. Reading the annual and multi-year numbers side by side is the whole exercise—it turns invisible drips into a figure you can actually weigh.

Forgotten trials that quietly renew

The most expensive subscriptions are the ones you have stopped noticing. Free trials are designed around a single behaviour: you sign up meaning to cancel, the reminder never comes, and the roll-over charge lands weeks later against a card you have mentally filed away. Annual plans compound the effect—one charge, twelve months of silence, then an automatic renewal you forgot was even due. Duplicate or overlapping services hide the same way: two music apps, a bundled feature you also pay for standalone. When you list everything in the calculator, these ghosts surface as line items you have to type out and defend. Illustratively, two forgotten £9 services running for a year is £216 spent on nothing you use. The fix is structural, not willpower: note every trial's roll-over date the moment you start it, and treat any renewal you cannot immediately recall signing up for as a prompt to check, not to ignore.

A ten-minute cancellation audit

Turn the total into action with a short, repeatable routine rather than a one-off purge. First, pull every recurring charge from one or two months of statements—card and app-store both, since subscriptions hide in each—and enter them here so nothing is estimated from memory. Second, sort by annual cost, because that is where a single cancellation frees the most; a £15 monthly item outranks three £4 ones. Third, for each line ask a plain question: did I use this in the last month? Anything you cannot answer confidently is your shortlist. Cancel from that shortlist immediately, while the page is open, since intention decays within minutes. Illustratively, dropping two unused services worth £12 and £8 a month recovers £240 a year. Then diarise a repeat in six months. Subscriptions accumulate continuously, so a periodic sweep keeps the total from silently rebuilding to where it started.

Which subscriptions earn their keep

Cancelling is easy; deciding well is the harder skill, and the calculator gives you the number to decide against. Judge each subscription by its annual cost versus how often you genuinely use it, not by whether the monthly price feels small. A service you open most days can be excellent value even at a higher figure, while a cheap one you touch twice a year quietly fails. A useful mental test: divide the yearly cost by realistic uses. Illustratively, a £120-a-year service used roughly weekly costs a little over £2 per use—probably fair; the same £120 used four times a year is £30 each, which asks a real question. Also weigh substitution and bundling: could one plan replace two, or a shared family tier undercut separate accounts? This is a framework for thinking, not a verdict on any specific service—the calculator surfaces the true numbers, and the value judgement remains entirely yours.