Subscription vampire — why the list is wrong
You cancel by price. You pay by cadence.
The one with the biggest number on it is rarely the one costing you most. Enter yours, then
see why the list is wrong.
$275.88
Streaming, billed monthly. The one you would cancel first.
$339.16
A weekly coffee run. It bills 52.18 times, so it wins.
What are your subscriptions actually costing you?
Subscriptions are small on purpose. Each one is priced to sit below the level at which you would stop and think about it, and the point of this tool is to add them up and run the total forward. It is not here to talk you out of anything. Some of these are worth every cent. You will know which after you see the number.
The free version models 3 subscriptions over 10 years. Pro takes it to 20 subscriptions and the full 50-year horizon, adds your own inflation and fee assumptions, a return basis computed from real price history, image, CSV and clipboard export, and a shareable link. Opening a link someone shares with you is free.
Pro is a separate one-time purchase. If you already subscribe to DCA Simulator Pro, this is not included in it — worth knowing before you click, rather than at the checkout.
Educational content only — not financial advice. This tool prices one alternative use of the money and nothing else. It does not know what a subscription is worth to you, and a service you genuinely use is not a leak. Past returns are past returns; nothing here is a projection of any specific asset, or a recommendation to buy, keep or cancel anything.
You cancel by price. You pay by cadence.
The subscription you resent is the one with the biggest number on it. That number is not what it costs you, and the gap between those two things is where the money goes.
What a subscription costs you is not its price. It is its price, times how often it bills, compounded for as long as you keep it.
Billing frequency is the part nobody converts. A weekly charge bills 52 times a year. A quarterly one bills four. Your brain files both as “small”.
So the ranking you act on — biggest price tag first — is not the ranking that costs you the most. You cancel the wrong one.
Take the three in the panel above. Asked which is the expensive one, most people say the $89 gym, because $89 is the biggest number on the page.
Run it properly and the gym is worst — but only just, and not for the reason anyone guesses. The $6.50 coffee run is within $250 of it over ten years, because $6.50 charged weekly is $28.26 a month. The $22.99 streaming subscription, the one that gets cancelled first in almost every household, is the cheapest of the three.
None of that is a judgement about coffee, or gyms, or streaming. It is arithmetic that nobody does, because doing it by hand across eight subscriptions on four different billing cycles is genuinely tedious.
That tedium is the entire reason the money is invisible.
Check it by hand if you want. It is not complicated, it is just tedious.
There is nothing proprietary in this tool and nothing to take on faith. Here is the whole conversion for the three subscriptions in the panel above, with every intermediate number left in.
| Subscription | Each charge | Charges a year | Cost a year | Cost a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gym · quarterly | $89.00 | 4 | $356.00 | $29.67 |
| Coffee run · weekly | $6.50 | 52.18 | $339.16 | $28.26 |
| Streaming · monthly | $22.99 | 12 | $275.88 | $22.99 |
| Anything billed yearly Illustration only — not in the total | $120.00 | 1 | $120.00 | $10.00 |
| The three above, combined | — | — | $971.04 | $80.92 |
A year is 52.18 weeks, not 52 — 365.25 days divided by 7. That is why the weekly coffee lands on $28.26 a month rather than $28.17. It is a small difference on one line and a compounding one across a list, which is the sort of thing a calculator should be doing instead of you.
- Gym $89.00
- Streaming $22.99
- Coffee run $6.50
- Gym $29.67
- Coffee run $28.26
- Streaming $22.99
- Gym $4,533
- Coffee run $4,284
- Streaming $3,485
Read those three columns left to right. The coffee run starts last — it is the smallest number on the page by a factor of thirteen — and finishes second, within $250 of the gym over ten years. The streaming subscription does the opposite: second by price, last by cost.
Nothing exotic did that. No assumption about markets did that. It happened in the third column of the table, before any investing arithmetic was applied at all — the flip is caused by billing frequency alone. Compounding then widens the gap; it does not create it.
Which is worth sitting with, because the streaming bill is the one almost everyone cancels first. It is the cheapest of the three. Cancelling it feels like the decisive move and is the least effective one available.
The list you would act on and the list that is costing you money are in a different order. You cannot see that without doing the conversion, and nobody does the conversion.
Four billing cycles, one comparable number.
Weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. It converts all of them to the same basis, invests the difference forward, and sorts by what you gave up rather than what you were charged.
Worst first, by forgone value
Not by price. Each subscription is scored on what it costs you across the whole horizon, so a small charge on a fast cycle can outrank a large one on a slow cycle — and frequently does.
The annual figure, as you type
A total sits under the list and updates while you add rows. Most people stop here, because seeing the year’s number in one place is usually the part that lands.
Priced in hours, not dollars
Enter your hourly rate and it converts the bill into hours worked per year to pay for these. Dollars are abstract. Hours are not.
What it costs your actual goal
Give it a savings target and what you already invest each month, and it reports how much sooner you would reach that target without the subscriptions.
The assumptions, stated plainly. The default is 7% a year after inflation — a disclosed rounding of the long-run figure, not a forecast, and you can change it. Inflation defaults to 3%. Every result is shown in today’s money as well as nominal, because a number thirty years out that has not been deflated is not a number you can reason about.
You can also compute the return basis from real price history rather than typing a rate, in which case the tool tells you the window it measured and the source it used.
Nothing here is a projection of what your money will do. It is what the same money would have done under a stated assumption you control. Educational content only — not financial advice.
Four fair arguments against this tool.
Each of these is a reasonable thing to think, and three of them are at least partly right. None of them is a reason not to spend ninety seconds finding out what your list actually looks like.
“It is six dollars fifty. This is exactly the coffee lecture I came here to avoid.”
Fair, and the coffee lecture deserves the contempt it gets. It is usually moralising dressed up as maths.
But look at what the table actually returned. The tool did not tell you to stop drinking coffee. It told you the coffee run and the gym membership cost within $250 of each other over ten years, and that both cost more than the streaming subscription you were about to cancel instead.
That is not a lecture, it is a correction to a ranking. What you do with the ranking is entirely your business — and “keep the coffee, cut the gym” is a perfectly good reading of it.
“Seven percent is a made-up number. Change the assumption and you change the answer.”
Correct, and it is stated as an assumption on the page rather than buried. It is a disclosed rounding of the long-run figure, not a forecast, and you can change it to whatever you think is honest.
Here is the part that matters though: changing it moves the sizes and barely moves the order. The ranking is driven almost entirely by how much each subscription costs per month, and that column is settled before any return assumption is applied at all.
So set the rate to four percent, or two. The forgone figures shrink. The gym is still ahead of the coffee, and the coffee is still ahead of the streaming. The finding survives the disagreement, which is the only reason it is worth putting in front of you.
“I would not have invested that money anyway. So the twelve thousand is fiction.”
Probably true, and it is the strongest objection on this page. Most cancelled subscriptions turn into spending somewhere else, not into contributions.
Read the number as a price tag rather than a prediction, then. It is not a forecast of your net worth. It is the answer to “what is the full cost of this thing, expressed in a unit that includes time” — and that is a legitimate thing to want to know before you renew something for another decade.
If it helps, use the hours-worked figure instead. That one does not depend on you investing anything.
“I already know roughly what I spend. I do not need a calculator for this.”
You probably do know the total, near enough. Most people are within twenty percent on the annual figure.
The total is not the interesting part. The order is, and the order is the part almost nobody has right — because getting it right means converting four billing cycles to a common basis across eight or nine line items, and no one does that in their head.
Ninety seconds settles it. If your list comes back in the order you expected, you have lost ninety seconds and gained a fact. That is a good trade.
None of this requires you to accept a worldview. It requires you to accept that $6.50 charged 52 times is $339 a year, which is not a matter of opinion.
This is a measuring tool, not a guilt tool.
It has no opinion about whether you should keep any of these. It tells you what each one costs so the decision is yours to make with the number in front of you.
- You have subscriptions on more than one billing cycle and have never converted them to a common basis
- You have decided to cut something and want to know which cut is actually worth making
- You think in terms of opportunity cost — not “can I afford this” but “what is this instead of”
- You want the figure in hours of your own labour, because that is the unit that changes behaviour
- You want a budgeting app. This models one question and does not track your spending
- You want it to link to your bank. It does not, and will not — you type the list in
- You are looking for permission to cancel things. The tool will not give you that; it just does the arithmetic
- You want a forecast. It has no idea what markets will do, and neither does anyone selling you one
Most tools in this category are built to make you feel bad about coffee. This one exists because the ranking people act on is reliably the wrong ranking, and that is a solvable problem — it just needs the conversion done properly across four billing cycles and a stated return assumption.
Run your list. If the answer is that your subscriptions are fine, that is a real answer and you have lost nothing by checking.
And if this is not for you, no hard feelings — close the tab.
Educational content only — not financial advice. This tool models a stated assumption you control; it is not a prediction, a recommendation, or a projection of what any investment will return. Figures shown on this page are produced by the calculator on its free default settings and are illustrative. Past performance does not indicate future results.
What the subscription calculator is actually measuring.
Answered against what the tool actually does, not against what would be convenient to claim.
How much do subscriptions really cost over time?
Far more than the monthly figure, for two reasons that compound together. The first is that the price rises — a subscription is a bill that grows, and the tool applies inflation to it rather than freezing it at today’s number. The second is that the money is gone in the year you spend it, so it never gets to grow.
That second part is the whole point. A subscription is not a monthly cost, it is a permanent withdrawal from a compounding balance. The tool prices both halves and shows you the total the same money would have reached instead.
Should I cancel all my subscriptions?
No, and any tool that pushes you toward that answer is selling you something. A subscription you use is a purchase, and purchases are allowed. The output is not an instruction.
What this is for is the narrower, more useful question: which of these am I paying for out of inertia rather than use? Price those specifically and the decision usually makes itself. Cancelling something you genuinely enjoy in order to make a spreadsheet look better is a worse outcome than the subscription was, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
What return does the calculation assume?
The default is 7% real — that is, after inflation. It is rounded up from a measured 6.74%: the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested returned 10.02% a year geometric over the 98 years from 1928 to 2025 (A. Damodaran, NYU Stern), against CPI-U inflation averaging 3.07% over the same window (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). (1.1002 / 1.0307) - 1 = 6.74%. It is a rounded figure, not “the historical average”.
Know which way it leans. This is the return earned by the money you did not spend, so a generous rate makes cancelling look better. The tool is mildly biased toward telling you to cancel, which is the direction a tool called Subscription Vampire would be biased in, and you should discount it accordingly.
Does it account for inflation and investment fees?
Inflation yes, at 3% a year by default, applied to the subscription prices so they rise the way real subscriptions do. Fees default to zero, which is deliberate rather than an oversight: it keeps the free comparison clean and means the tool is showing you a gross figure.
That matters when you read the total. A real portfolio pays something — a fund fee, a platform fee — and every basis point of it comes off the number on screen. Pro lets you set both the inflation and the fee assumption yourself, and adds a return basis computed from real price history rather than the flat default.
How many subscriptions and how many years can I model?
The free version models three subscriptions over ten years, which is enough to answer the question for most people — the three you already suspect are the three worth pricing.
Pro takes it to twenty subscriptions and a fifty-year horizon, and adds image, CSV and clipboard export. If the three-subscription answer already told you what you needed, you do not need Pro.
Is my data saved or sent anywhere?
No. There is no account, no email gate and no sign-up. Your figures are sent to this site to be calculated, and the answer comes straight back — nothing you enter is written to a database, kept after the response, or passed to any third party.
The only thing this page stores in your browser is whether you chose dark mode. Nothing is inferred about you and nothing is looked up.
Everything above stays free. Pro goes further.
Pro takes it to twenty subscriptions and the full fifty-year horizon, adds your own inflation and fee assumptions, a return basis computed from real price history, and image, CSV and clipboard export.
Paid once. Not a subscription, not a bundle.
The free version models three subscriptions over ten years. If that already told you what you needed, you do not need this. Educational content only — not financial advice.