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Subscription Cost Calculator

Add up what renews automatically each month, then see what it costs over five years once providers start putting prices up. The second number is usually the surprising one.

Free to useNo sign-upRuns in your browserUK
What you pay for
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Include everything that renews on its own: streaming, music, mobile, broadband, gym, cloud storage, news, software, insurance add-ons, app store subscriptions and charity direct debits.
Price creep
The rate providers raise prices each year. Between 5% and 10% is the range most UK subscription services have moved in recently. Set it to 0 to see the flat cost.
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Adding this shows what share of your pay renews automatically each month.
Cost this year
£0
Every month
Every year
Over five years at today’s prices
Over five years with price creep
What the creep alone costs you
Annual cost, year by year
Subscriptions counted
Dearest single item

What this calculator assumes

  • Weekly costs are multiplied by 52, monthly by 12 and quarterly by 4 to reach an annual figure.
  • The price creep rate is applied once a year to every subscription in the list. Year one is charged at today’s price, year two at that price plus the creep rate, and so on.
  • The five-year figure is the sum of five annual charges, not a discounted present value. It is what leaves your account, not what it is worth in today’s money.
  • Real price rises are lumpy — providers tend to hold a price for a while then raise it in one step. A steady annual rate is a reasonable way to model the average, not a prediction about any one service.
  • Nothing here accounts for you cancelling, downgrading, switching to an annual plan or moving to a competitor, all of which change the number substantially.
  • Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no account, no sign-up and no data stored.

The 5% to 10% creep range reflects the pattern of recent UK price rises across streaming, music, mobile and gym subscriptions. It is a modelling assumption you can change with the slider, not a forecast.

Why subscriptions are hard to see

The problem with recurring payments is not that they are large. It is that they are individually forgettable and collectively substantial. A £12.99 charge does not register as a decision. Twelve of them, spread across a current account, two credit cards, an App Store bill and a PayPal balance, add up to something most people would never agree to as a single annual purchase.

Three things make the total genuinely difficult to work out by hand. Payments are fragmented across accounts, so no single statement shows all of them. Annual charges are invisible for eleven months of the year, which is why software licences, antivirus renewals and professional memberships are the most commonly forgotten. And prices drift upward without a new decision from you — the charge still appears under the same name, just slightly larger.

That last one is what this calculator is really about. A single £1 monthly increase is beneath notice. Applied to a whole portfolio of subscriptions, annually, for five years, it is not.

What price creep compounds to

Take the list this calculator loads with: streaming at £12.99 a month, music at £11.99, a mobile plan at £22, a gym at £29.99, cloud storage at £8.99 and Amazon Prime at £95 a year. That is £93.88 a month, or £1,126.52 a year. Nothing on that list is extravagant, and most UK households would recognise a version of it.

Now hold the list completely still for five years — cancel nothing, add nothing — and let prices rise 7% a year:

£1,126.52 a year at 7% annual price creep
Year 1£1,126.52
Year 2£1,205.38
Year 3£1,289.76
Year 4£1,380.04
Year 5£1,476.64
Five-year total£6,478.32

At today’s prices the same five years would cost £5,632.60. The creep alone accounts for £845.72, and by year five the identical set of services costs £350.12 a year more than it does now — a 31% increase that arrived without a single decision on your part. Push the rate to 10% and the five-year bill reaches £6,877.52.

The useful move is not necessarily to cancel. It is to notice, because a price rise you can see is a price rise you can respond to — by downgrading a tier, switching to an annual plan, moving to a competitor, or deciding that the service is still worth it at the new price. All of those are fine outcomes. Paying more because nobody told you is the only bad one.

What people forget to list

If your total looks lower than you expected, the gaps are usually in the same places:

For a fuller treatment, see our guides on tracking subscriptions automatically and cancelling subscriptions in the UK.

Frequently asked questions

How much do UK households spend on subscriptions?▾
It varies widely, but a household with streaming, music, a mobile plan, a gym membership and cloud storage will typically be somewhere between £80 and £150 a month, or £960 to £1,800 a year. The Money Advice Service estimates the average UK household wastes £528 a year on subscriptions it no longer uses — that is the waste figure, not the total. Most people underestimate their own subscription count by a third or more, largely because charges are spread across several accounts and payment methods.
What is subscription price creep?▾
Price creep is the practice of raising a subscription price by a small amount, usually annually, without a prominent notification. The increase is typically communicated in an email that resembles ordinary marketing, and on your bank statement the charge still appears under the same merchant name, just slightly larger. Because no single rise is big enough to prompt a decision, the cumulative effect can be a 30% increase over five years that you never actively agreed to.
What creep rate should I use?▾
Between 5% and 10% covers the range most UK subscription services have moved in recently, which is why the slider defaults to 7%. Streaming and gym memberships have tended toward the upper end, mobile contracts often have contractual annual rises written into the terms, and some services hold prices for years then move in a single large step. If you want a conservative view, run it at 5%. Setting the slider to 0 shows the flat cost, which is a useful floor rather than a realistic forecast.
Is it better to pay monthly or annually?▾
Annual plans are usually cheaper per month — a discount of 15% to 20% is common — and they lock the price for twelve months, which delays the next increase. The trade-offs are that you pay a larger sum up front, and that an annual charge is much easier to forget, so a service you stopped using in March keeps billing until the following January. Annual billing suits things you are confident you will use for a full year; monthly suits anything you are still evaluating.
How do I find subscriptions I have forgotten about?▾
Manually, the method is to pull three months of statements from every account and card you use, including PayPal and your App Store or Google Play billing history, and list every payment that appears more than once to the same merchant. That catches monthly charges but tends to miss annual ones, which is why twelve months is better if you have the patience. Automating it is the alternative — earmarkIQ scans transactions across every connected UK bank account and identifies recurring payments across all of them at once, including annual charges.
Does this calculator save my list?▾
No. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is transmitted or stored. If you close the tab, the list is gone. That is deliberate for a tool with no sign-up, but it does mean you will want to note the total somewhere if you plan to come back to it.

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The hard part is remembering to check

Typing your subscriptions into a box works once. The reason people stop is that the list changes underneath them — a trial converts, a price moves, a service you cancelled keeps billing. earmarkIQ’s Subscription Radar reads recurring payments straight from your connected accounts and flags the moment an amount changes, with the old price, the new price and the annual difference.

See Subscription Radar → Read the UK subscription guide → Get the app →