What your subscriptions really cost per year

Take your monthly subscription total and multiply it by twelve. That’s the whole trick, and almost nobody does it, because subscription pricing is designed to be judged one month at a time. $119 a month doesn’t feel like $1,430 a year, but it is.

The multiplication nobody does

A few common prices, at the time of writing, in US dollars:

Service	Per month	Per year
Netflix Standard	$17.99	$215.88
Spotify Premium	$11.99	$143.88
ChatGPT Plus	$20.00	$240.00
Adobe Creative Cloud	$59.99	$719.88

None of these is outrageous on its own. Together, that table alone is $1,319.64 a year, and most people carry more than four subscriptions once streaming, storage, fitness and news are counted.

The point isn’t that any one price is wrong. It’s that the yearly number is the honest one, and you almost never see it written down.

Why the total creeps

Three forces push the number up quietly:

• Price rises land one at a time. A $1 increase here, $2 there, each announced in an email you didn’t read. The monthly total drifts up without any decision from you.
• Trials convert silently. A free month becomes a paid month unless you act. The free trial guide covers how to stop that.
• Cancelled doesn’t always mean cancelled. Duplicate accounts, family plans that outlived the family, the app you deleted but never cancelled.

How to get your real number

1. List everything. Apple’s Subscriptions list (Settings, your name, Subscriptions), plus three months of card statements for the directly billed ones, plus an email search for “renewal” and “receipt”.
2. Convert everything to monthly. Annual charges divide by twelve; that £71.99 yearly app is £6 a month whether it feels like it or not.
3. Multiply the total by twelve. Write the yearly figure down.
4. Ask one question per line: did I use this in the last month? A “no” is not automatically a cancellation, but it is a conversation.

Steps 1 and 2 are the tedious part, and they’re what SubHelm automates: every subscription in one place, every currency converted, one real monthly and yearly total, and a reminder before each charge. The audit you do once, it keeps doing.

What a realistic saving looks like

Ignore the “save $500 instantly” marketing. In practice, most people find one or two subscriptions they’d genuinely stopped using. Cutting a $12 and a $18 subscription is $360 a year, done in ten minutes, with nothing lost. That’s the honest version of this exercise, and it’s still easily worth an evening.