Subscription Cost Calculator

Two reasons. First, almost every service has raised prices over the past few years — Netflix, Disney+, music streamers, and news publishers have all hiked rates 20–60% since 2022. Second, subscriptions accumulate quietly: you add one for a free trial, forget about it, then add another. The monthly bill grows even when your usage doesn’t.

It’s what that money could have grown to if you’d invested it instead. $40/month invested at 7% real returns becomes about $48,000 over 30 years. That’s the cost we show — not because you should never spend money, but because the long-term number is usually much larger than people guess.

7% is the long-term real (after-inflation) average for a diversified US stock portfolio since 1928. It’s a planning baseline, not a guarantee — single years swing from −30% to +30%. We use real returns and today’s dollars throughout, so the opportunity-cost number reflects modern purchasing power, not inflated future dollars.

There’s no canonical rule. A rough sanity check: subscriptions plus other recurring discretionary spending (gym, food delivery memberships, etc.) should typically stay under 5% of take-home pay. If yours is higher, that’s a signal to audit — not necessarily to cancel everything, but to ask which ones earn their slot.

Check your bank or credit card statement for recurring charges over the last three months — that surfaces the obvious ones. For app-store subscriptions, look in your phone’s subscription settings (iOS: Settings → your name → Subscriptions; Android: Google Play → Subscriptions). Services like Truebill or Rocket Money automate this for a fee; the manual version takes about an hour and is free.

No. Some subscriptions are excellent value — software that saves you hours of work, news you actually read, a gym you actually use. The point of this tool is to make the cumulative cost visible so you can decide which ones earn it, not to tell you to cancel everything.