$9.99/month sounds harmless. Stretched across a decade it's $1,200 spent - and roughly $1,720 in foregone investment growth. Run any subscription through the calculator and see for yourself.
Same monthly amount, contributed to a low-cost index fund earning the long-run US stock market average. Inflation-adjusted, conservative.
A $9.99/month subscription costs $1,199 over 10 years - or $1,729 if you invested it instead.
FinNudge connects read-only to your bank, auto-detects every recurring charge across your accounts, watches for price hikes weekly, and flags likely-cancelled subscriptions before they keep charging quietly.
Try FinNudge free →No credit card · Spark tier is freeThe first column - total cost - is simple arithmetic: monthly price × 12 × years. No compounding, no inflation adjustment, just the literal dollars that will leave your bank account if the subscription stays unchanged.
The second column - invested at 7%/yr - uses the future-value-of-an-annuity formula with monthly contributions and a 7% annual return compounded monthly. 7% is the long-run inflation-adjusted return of the US stock market, which is the standard consensus assumption for retirement planning. It is conservative enough to defend and high enough to make the gap visible.
The gap between the two columns is the opportunity cost of the subscription - the wealth you forgo by spending the money on a recurring service rather than investing it. For a single $9.99/mo subscription that gap is ~$500 over a decade. For ten of them, it's $5,000.
The point of this calculator is not to convince you to cancel everything. Most subscriptions you actively use are excellent deals - Spotify Family at $17/mo across five people is roughly $3.40 per person for unlimited music.
The point is to surface the ones that have quietlycompounded - the ones you signed up for during a project and forgot to cancel, the trial-converted-to-paid services you haven't opened in six months, the price hikes that took your $9.99 streaming service to $24.99 without you noticing. Those are the subscriptions whose opportunity cost the calculator should make obvious.
7% is the long-run inflation-adjusted return of the US stock market. We use it because it is the consensus assumption financial planners use for retirement projections - conservative enough to defend, optimistic enough to be motivating.
Partially. The 7% rate is the real return (already inflation-adjusted). We do not, however, model subscription price hikes over time - which is the entire point of the FinNudge Subscription Watchdog agent. In practice your subscription will cost more than the static projection suggests.
No. This is an educational calculator. Past performance does not guarantee future returns, the stock market has had multi-decade periods of low returns, and personal investment decisions depend on your situation, taxes, and risk tolerance. Talk to a fiduciary advisor before making investment changes.
This calculator is a one-time projection. FinNudge connects read-only to your bank, auto-detects every recurring charge, watches for price hikes weekly, and surfaces likely-cancelled subscriptions so you can confirm them before they keep charging quietly.
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