Spending & savings · 1 min
Subscriptions are priced in the one unit designed to feel like nothing: per month. This instrument re-prices the stack in units that feel like something — the annual bill, the hours of your working life that pay it, and the ten-year compounded figure the monthly framing exists to hide.
Streaming, software, memberships, storage, the app you forgot. Sum the card statement, not the memory.
The once-a-year charges that never make the mental list.
Sets the load and your hourly value.
Everything is calculated in your browser as you type. Nothing you enter is sent or stored, and no account is needed.
A standing allocation.
$5,460 / yr
the stack, restated annually
| The stack, per year | — |
| Hours of your life, per year | — |
| Ten years of the stack, paid as it goes | — |
| The same money invested as it went | — |
| The decade's true cost | — |
| If you cut | New annual bill | Decade reclaimed |
|---|---|---|
| — | — | — |
| — | — | — |
| — | — | — |
Some subscriptions are the cheapest employees you have — the tool that saves an hour a week pays for itself forty times over. Bill the idle ones; keep the working ones without guilt.
The stack regrows. Auditing once is a haircut; the standing habit is a calendar note every January with the card statement open.
Family plans, bundles and annual billing all trade flexibility for discount — worth it only for the services that survived last year's audit.
Everything below is calculated from your inputs. The market return is an assumption you control.
annual = monthly × 12 + annually_billed
hours = annual / (net / (weekly_hours × 46))
decade = annual × ((1+r)^10 − 1) / r — each year's bill invested as paid
The gauge reads the annual bill against net income, the line at the house 2% — past it, the stack has become a standing allocation and deserves an annual review like any other. The decade figure is the honest one: subscriptions are decade-length commitments sold in monthly costume.
Limitations. Price rises — the industry's favourite move — are not modelled; the real decade figure is worse. Business-deductible subscriptions soften their net cost by your tax rate.