Subscription Cost Calculator: Your Real Monthly and Yearly Total

This calculator runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and the list disappears when you close the page. Type in each subscription with its price and billing period, and it converts every one of them to a monthly figure, adds them up, and shows what the result becomes over a year and over five. It names the biggest line, and it will show you the totals without any single row. Subscriptions are the spending people underestimate most, and not because any one of them is large. It is that they never appear together anywhere. Not on a statement, not in an app, not in your head at two in the morning. This is the one place they do.

How to use it

1. The first field holds the currency symbol that prefixes every result. It defaults to a dollar sign, so change it to whatever your statements use. It is only a label. The arithmetic is identical in any currency.
2. The calculator opens with four example rows, a video service, a music service, a yearly cloud plan and a weekly gym fee, so you can see how each billing period is handled. Overwrite the names and prices with your own and delete whatever you do not have.
3. Press add for each further subscription. A row takes a name, a price and a billing period: monthly, yearly or weekly. There is no quarterly option, because quarterly plans are rare enough not to earn one. Enter a quarterly price as a yearly figure multiplied by 4.
4. The big number is what your subscriptions cost per month, once the yearly and weekly prices have been converted. Below it sit the same money per year and over five years, then whichever subscription takes the largest share.
5. Finally, the what-if menu lists every row you entered. Pick one and the line beneath shows your new monthly and yearly totals without it. Nothing happens to the real subscription. It is a way of seeing which cancellation would actually move the number.

Rows with an empty price are ignored, and the total only appears once at least one row has a price above zero.

Worth knowing before you start: nothing here is saved. Reload the page and the list is gone, which people find irritating and which is the point. A page that remembered your subscription list would have to store it somewhere, and there is nowhere to store it that is not somebody's server. Build the list once, read the five-year figure, then put the subscriptions in a tracker where they belong.

What the monthly total means here

The number the calculator leads with is a normalized monthly cost. Every subscription is converted to what it costs per month before anything is added up:

monthly price stays as it is · yearly price ÷ 12 · weekly price × 52 ÷ 12

The weekly conversion is worth a second look, because four weeks is not a month. A year holds 52 weeks and 12 months, so one month is 4.33 weeks, which makes a $12 weekly charge $52 a month rather than $48, and over a year that gap is itself $48. Anyone estimating a weekly cost by multiplying by four is running low. Always by the same amount, always in the same direction.

The per-year figure is the monthly total multiplied by 12, and the five-year figure is that multiplied by 5. There is no inflation, no compounding and no price rise built in, which is a deliberate choice. Every one of those adjustments would need an assumption, and an assumption you did not make is not your number. The total is a floor: the least these subscriptions will cost if nothing changes.

The biggest line is the row with the largest monthly cost, shown with its share of the total, and its job is to point at the decision that matters. If one subscription is 40 percent of everything, cancelling three small ones will not move the figure the way renegotiating or dropping that one will.

Under it, the what-if line gives the total without whichever subscription you pick. It answers one specific question: cancel this, and what do I actually save in a year? For small services the answer is usually less than people fear. For the big one it is usually more than they expect.

What the calculator does not know

It adds up what you tell it, which is a short list of abilities. Being clear about the rest is more useful than pretending.

It cannot see your statements, so the list is only as complete as your memory plus the last two months of bank and card activity. The ones most often missed bill quarterly, annually, or through a family member's account, and a missed subscription means a total that is too low.

It knows nothing about trials either. A free trial that converts next month costs nothing today and full price from then on. Enter trials at their post-trial price if you mean to keep them, or at zero with a note to cancel if you do not.

It ignores price changes, which only ever go one way, sometimes with a notice email and sometimes not. So the five-year figure is the least you will pay rather than the most.

And it has no opinion about value, which is the real limit. A $50 a month gym you visit four times a week and a $50 a month gym you have not entered since spring both show up as $50. The arithmetic is the easy part. What you cancel, keep or downgrade depends on your budget, your household and your priorities, and this page knows none of them.

Three lists

Start with the default four: video at $15.49 a month, music at $10.99 a month, cloud storage at $99 a year, a gym at $12 a week. Converted, that is $15.49, $10.99, $8.25 and $52, coming to $86.73 a month, $1,040.76 a year and $5,203.80 over five years. The gym is the biggest line at 60 percent of the total. Cancelling the cloud plan, which feels like the obvious cut, saves $99 a year. Cancelling the gym saves $624. The calculator does not say which is right. It says which is bigger.

Nine rows is more typical once app store renewals are counted. Video $15.49, a second video service $9.99, music $10.99, a news site $12.50, cloud storage $2.99, a fitness app $79.99 a year, a language app $12.99, a meal kit $60 a week and a games service $16.99. Monthly, that is $15.49 + $9.99 + $10.99 + $12.50 + $2.99 + $6.67 + $12.99 + $260 + $16.99, or $348.61. Per year, $4,183. Over five years, $20,917. The meal kit is 75 percent of the total, and tidying up the small services changes nothing while it stays.

The third case is a single service deciding how to bill you: $12.99 a month or $99 a year. Enter it both ways and the monthly plan shows $155.88 a year against the yearly plan's $99, a difference of $56.88. Real, if you use the thing for twelve months. Imaginary if you cancel in month four, when the monthly plan would have cost $51.96 in total. Pay yearly for what you have already used for a year.

Watching the list after the audit

The calculator gives you one snapshot. Subscriptions are worth watching continuously, because they change quietly, and that takes a place where they are logged as they happen.

In Cash Book the natural first step is a tag. Tags and categories let you create a Subscriptions tag, with its own emoji, and file every renewal under it; the tag total at the end of the month is the same number this calculator produced, except it reflects what was actually charged. Put a monthly allowance on that tag with budgets and the thin progress bar shows how much of the subscription budget is used before the month ends, turning red only if it goes over.

Renewals that go through Apple Pay can log themselves. Apple Pay auto-logging uses a one-time Shortcuts automation so that every card tap opens Cash Book and records the amount and merchant, which catches the renewal you forgot was due. For everything else, the voice logging mic takes a sentence like "twelve ninety-nine language app renewal" and files it in seconds.

The setup that catches all of them, including the annual ones that surprise you in March, is in how to track subscriptions and recurring bills. If the monthly total from the calculator needs a home in a wider plan, how to make a monthly budget that sticks shows where fixed subscriptions sit inside it.

Two companion guides to this calculator go deeper. The yearly cost of monthly subscriptions explains why small monthly prices become large annual ones and gives a reference table. How to audit your subscriptions is the step-by-step review: where to find them, how to decide, how to cancel cleanly.

The other tools

Subscriptions are one slice of a budget, and the other calculators on this site cover the rest. The 50/30/20 budget calculator splits take-home pay into needs, wants and savings, which tells you which bucket your subscription total has to fit inside. The daily spending allowance calculator takes what is left after fixed costs, including these subscriptions, and turns it into a daily number. The savings goal calculator shows what redirecting a cancelled subscription toward a goal does to the date you reach it. The small purchases calculator does for coffees and snacks what this one does for subscriptions. And the hours of work calculator translates any price, including a yearly subscription total, into the time it takes to earn it.

Where to go next

The total on this page is a good reason to start logging. Subscriptions are the easiest spending to automate and the easiest to forget, and a tracker that shows the tag total each month is the difference between knowing the number once and knowing it always.

Set up the tag and put an allowance on it: budgets covers monthly and per-tag caps and how the Home screen shows what is left. Then automate what you can, because how to track Apple Pay purchases automatically walks through the Shortcuts automation once and renewals stop needing to be typed at all. After a month or two, Insights is where a new subscription or a quiet price rise first becomes visible, since it names the tags that changed against last month. The two companion guides handle the rest: the yearly-cost one for the arithmetic, the audit one for the review.

Come back here whenever a new subscription is about to start. Adding the row before you sign up, and reading the five-year figure, is a small habit that tends to shorten the list.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.