Subscriptions calculator
What do the subscriptions really cost over ten years, and what if that money were invested instead?
Every plan normalised to a month — an annual ₹1,499 counts as ₹125, not ₹1,499. A trial counts at what it will cost.
Annual. Set it to 0 and the chart collapses to what you simply spent.
₹3,60,000on subscriptions over 10 years
- Every month
- ₹3,000
- Every year
- ₹36,000
- Invested instead
- ₹6,97,017
- What the habit costs on top
- ₹3,37,017
Assumes the price never rises, which no subscription has ever honoured. Returns are assumed, not guaranteed.
- Paid out
- Growth given up
| Year | Paid out | Growth given up | Could have been |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ₹36,000 | ₹2,428 | ₹38,428 |
| 2 | ₹72,000 | ₹9,730 | ₹81,730 |
| 3 | ₹1,08,000 | ₹22,523 | ₹1,30,523 |
| 4 | ₹1,44,000 | ₹41,505 | ₹1,85,505 |
| 5 | ₹1,80,000 | ₹67,459 | ₹2,47,459 |
| 6 | ₹2,16,000 | ₹1,01,271 | ₹3,17,271 |
| 7 | ₹2,52,000 | ₹1,43,937 | ₹3,95,937 |
| 8 | ₹2,88,000 | ₹1,96,580 | ₹4,84,580 |
| 9 | ₹3,24,000 | ₹2,60,465 | ₹5,84,465 |
| 10 | ₹3,60,000 | ₹3,37,017 | ₹6,97,017 |
Nobody decides to spend ₹30,000 a year on subscriptions. It arrives one ₹149 charge at a time, on a card you stopped reading the statement for. This puts the whole habit on one line: add up every plan you are paying for, normalise the annual ones to a month, and it says what that comes to a year, what it comes to over however long you keep paying — and what the same instalment would have grown into if it had gone into a SIP instead. The second number is the one that stings, because the money you did not spend would not just have sat there.
Getting your real monthly total
The one input that matters is the first one, and it is the one people guess at. Guessing is always low — the charges you forget are exactly the ones you are not using.
- 01
Pull two months of card and UPI statements, not one.
A quarterly or annual renewal will not appear in a single month, and those are the biggest individual charges.
- 02
Write down every recurring charge, with the amount and the cycle.
Include the ones bundled into a phone plan or a credit card fee if you would not pay for them separately.
- 03
Divide annual prices by 12 and quarterly prices by 3.
A ₹1,499-a-year plan is ₹125 a month. This is the step that makes the total comparable.
- 04
Add a trial at what it will cost, not at zero.
The day it converts is the day it becomes real, and it converts by default.
- 05
Add it up and type the total in the first field.
The slider moves in ₹100 steps; round to the nearest hundred.
A worked example
Say the list comes to a ₹649 streaming plan, a ₹149 music plan, a ₹149 video plan, two ₹1,499-a-year memberships (₹125 each), and a ₹1,200 gym — ₹2,397 a month, which rounds to ₹2,400. Set the three fields above to ₹2,400 a month, 10 years, and 12%, and the page returns:
- ₹28,800 every year
- ₹2,88,000 paid out over the ten years — that is the headline
- ₹5,57,614 if the same ₹2,400 had gone into a monthly SIP instead
- ₹2,69,614 as what the habit costs on top of the money itself
That last figure is the whole point of the page. The ₹2,88,000 is not the cost of the subscriptions. The cost is the ₹5,57,614 you do not have, and the growth you never earned is nearly as large as the money you spent.
- ₹2,88,000 Paid out — money that actually left your account
- ₹2,69,614 Growth given up — the compounding that never happened
The same rupees, two fates. The bar is the ₹5,57,614 corpus that did not get built.
The gap is small early and then it is not. After one year the growth given up is only ₹1,942 — you have barely lost anything, because there was barely any time for it to compound. By year five it is ₹53,967 against ₹1,44,000 paid. By year ten it is ₹2,69,614 against ₹2,88,000 paid, and the two halves have nearly drawn level. Push the tenure to twenty years and the arithmetic stops being close at all.
Doubling the tenure doubles what you pay and multiplies what you forgo by nearly seven.
Cancelling everything is not the lesson. One ₹649 plan nobody watches, dropped now and left dropped for ten years, is ₹77,880 paid and ₹1,50,788 of corpus at 12% — run the numbers on the single row you already know you do not use.
What this number does not account for
The price never rises here
The calculation holds your monthly total flat for the whole tenure, and no streaming, music or cloud service has ever honoured that. Every hike after today is on top of the figure above, and so is every plan you add. This is a floor, not an estimate.
You get something for the money
Nothing is subtracted for value received. A gym you actually attend and a plan you watch nightly are not losses — they are the same arithmetic as a holiday. The figure measures cost, and only you can put the benefit against it.
The SIP is a counterfactual, not a plan
It assumes you invest the cancelled amount every single month, on time, for the whole tenure, and never touch it. Money saved on a subscription usually gets spent on something else. Set up the SIP the day you cancel or the comparison is fiction.
The corpus is before tax and costs
No exit load, no expense ratio and no capital-gains tax are deducted. Gains on equity funds held long term are taxed under section 112A of the Income-tax Act above an exempt threshold, and the fund charges its expense ratio every year. What you would actually keep is less than the "could have been" column.
Three more that are specific to how this is calculated. The instalment is credited from the month it is paid — an annuity-due — which reads about 1% higher than a calculator that compounds from the month after; the direction of the argument does not change, but do not treat the last digits as precise. The figures are in today’s rupees with no inflation adjustment, so the ₹5,57,614 a decade out buys meaningfully less than ₹5,57,614 buys today, and so does the ₹2,88,000 you would have spent. And the table assumes you keep paying for the full tenure: a subscription cancelled in year four appears nowhere in it, which is precisely why the honest use of this page is to change the input rather than admire the output.
Where to go next
Once you have decided what to cancel, the SIP calculator is where the cancelled amount becomes a real plan — including the step-up, which is what actually moves a corpus. If you would rather have a guaranteed return than a market one, the recurring deposit calculator does the same monthly instalment at a bank’s fixed rate. And if you want to see what the habit does to the far end of your life rather than to a ten-year corpus, the FIRE calculator prices the gap in years of work.
How much is too much to spend on subscriptions?
There is no correct number, and any figure quoted as one is invented. The useful test is not the total but the ratio: what share of the total are you actually using this month? Type your real monthly total in above, then go through the list and mark each row used or unused. What makes a total look bad is almost never the habit — it is the rows nobody opens, and only your own list shows you which those are. A ₹2,400 total where you watch everything is a fine budget line; a ₹2,400 total where ₹1,000 of it is three services nobody has opened since March is the part worth cancelling.
Is it cheaper to pay yearly or monthly for a subscription?
An annual plan is almost always cheaper per month — usually the equivalent of one or two months free — so if you are certain you will use the service for the whole year, take it. The catch is that the annual price is a bet on your own future attention, paid in advance and rarely refundable, and it hides the cost from you for eleven months. This calculator makes both comparable by normalising to a month: divide the annual price by twelve before you add it to the total, so a ₹1,499-a-year plan enters as ₹125 and not as ₹1,499.
How do I stop a subscription from auto-renewing on my card in India?
Cancelling inside the app stops the next charge for most services, but the standing instruction on your card is a separate thing and it survives an uninstall. Under the RBI's framework for recurring e-mandates on cards, the mandate you approved must be registered with your bank, the issuer has to send you a pre-debit notification before each charge, and above a value threshold the RBI sets, each debit needs an extra authentication step. That means you can also kill the payment from the bank's side: your net-banking or card app has a list of registered e-mandates, and revoking one there stops the debit even if the merchant's cancel button does not work. Do both — cancel in the app, then check the mandate list.
Is 12% a realistic return to assume for the invested-instead figure?
It is the number diversified Indian equity funds have averaged over long periods, which is history and not a promise. Over any single decade the outcome could be well above or well below it, and the calculation here compounds monthly with no bad years in it, which no real market has ever offered. Treat it as a scale, not a forecast: drag the rate to 8% and the "could have been" on a ₹2,400 monthly habit over ten years falls from ₹5,57,614 to ₹4,41,998, and at 0% it collapses to the ₹2,88,000 you simply paid. If you would have parked the money somewhere guaranteed rather than in equity, set the rate to what that instrument actually pays.
Does the figure include GST on my subscriptions?
Whatever you type in is what leaves your account, so if the price you are billed is GST-inclusive — which consumer digital subscriptions billed in India generally are — then yes, it is already in there. Two things are not. A service that bills you in dollars also attracts your card issuer's foreign-currency markup, plus GST on that markup, so the rupee figure on your statement is higher than the sticker price you converted. And a plan bought through an app store can carry a different price from the same plan bought on the web. Take the numbers off your card and UPI statement, not off the pricing page.
This page starts from typical figures. In Hundo the same calculator opens on your own — the loan, the deposit, the salary already on the ledger — and says where each number came from.