Work out what your subscriptions really cost in a year

Every row gets an annual figure first, exactly: the price multiplied by how many times a year it arrives. The monthly column is that annual figure divided by twelve. It is done in that order on purpose, and the order is the difference between a sheet that adds up and one that does not.

Weekly is the row where this bites. A five-pound weekly charge is two hundred and sixty pounds a year, which is twenty-one pounds and sixty-seven pence a month — not twenty. Counting a week as a quarter of a month loses four weeks a year on every weekly row, and a household with a meal kit and a coffee subscription is then forty pounds out before anything else is typed. Quarterly rows go wrong the other way: people round three months to a third of the year rather than a quarter, and undercount.

The consequence is a total you can check. The monthly figure is one rounding of the year, so twelve of it is the year give or take a few pence. Sheets built the other way round round every row and then add the roundings up, which drifts further the more rows you type — and on a page whose entire claim is "here is the real figure", a total that does not match the column above it is the one error nobody forgives.

Anything arriving twice a year or less is marked on the sheet, and the line above it says what those come to and what share of the year they are. This is usually the sentence people screenshot.

The reason is simple. A subscription billed monthly is a thing you have a relationship with: it appears on the statement, you see it, you have opinions about it. A subscription billed once a year is invisible for eleven months and then arrives on a Tuesday, and because it arrived on a Tuesday rather than on the first of the month, no monthly budget was ever expecting it. Password managers, antivirus, domain names, design software, professional memberships, warranties and most fitness apps are billed this way, and in a lot of households they are a quarter of the total.

Which is also why the prompt list under the form leans on them. Nobody undercounts their subscriptions because they cannot add up. They undercount because eleven things never crossed their mind, and most of those eleven bill once a year or go through an app store where they do not look like a subscription at all.

The last column is what one use of each thing costs, and the shortlist at the bottom is the list in that order, worst value first.

Ranking by price is the obvious thing to do and it is the wrong thing to do, because it tells you to cancel the one you use every single day. A streaming service at fifteen a month, watched most evenings, is about fifty pence a sitting and is the best value on most people's sheets. A fitness app at nine a month, opened twice, is four pounds fifty a session — and the thing nobody wants to admit is that the second one is usually the third or fourth cheapest row on the page, which is precisely why it survives every cull.

The shortlist puts the ones you said you never use at the top, with what they come to in a year, and then the rest by cost per use. A row you have not answered the "how often" question for is not on the list at all, in either direction: the page will not tell you to cancel something on the strength of a question you have not answered.

Answer the use question honestly rather than aspirationally, and answer it for last month rather than for the month you intend to have. The number that makes this exercise useful is the embarrassing one.

The prompts fill in a name and the cadence that kind of charge usually arrives on, and then stop. They will never fill in a price, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

A price in a list like this would be wrong for your country on the day it was written and out of date within the year, and a page that quotes a stale figure at you has lost the argument about whether its arithmetic can be trusted. Worse, a plausible number beside a familiar name invites you to accept it instead of going and looking — and going and looking is the part of this exercise that cannot be skipped, because the price you are actually paying is frequently not the price you signed up at.

So the prompts are for recall, not for arithmetic. Go through them, tap the ones that apply, and then find the real figure: the statement, the app store's subscriptions screen, the email from when it renewed.

It cannot find your subscriptions. There is no bank connection here, no email scan and no account, and there is not going to be one — all three of those need a server holding a credential, which is the opposite of a page that keeps everything in the tab you are looking at.

It also cannot cancel anything, and it does not know your renewal dates. If you want the sheet to tell you a charge is coming before it arrives, that is a thing that has to remember something, which is the next paragraph.

Two ways this sheet is actually used, and they suit different households.

The per-person figure is there for the conversation rather than for the arithmetic. "Two hundred and forty a month" is a number people argue about. "Eighty each, for the three of us" is a number people make a decision about.

1. Print it, and put it somewhere two adults will both see it before the next renewal — the same place the bills go. The page prints the table, the totals and the cancel-first list, and nothing else.
2. Or skip the printing and take exactly one decision now, from the top of the shortlist. A household that cancels the single worst-value row on the page has captured most of the value of the exercise; one that resolves to review all nineteen rows properly at the weekend has usually captured none of it.

A printed audit is a snapshot, and it decays in a specific way: it cannot notice. The yearly charge you found today renews in eleven months, by which time the sheet is in a drawer, and nothing tells you it is coming except the statement it already appeared on. The price rises you were annoyed about are invisible, because there is nothing to compare the new figure to.

You have outgrown the sheet the second time you do this exercise and find a charge you had found before. At that point what you need is not a better calculator but something that keeps the list: the Subscriptions app holds each one with its renewal date and its price history, tells the household before a renewal rather than after it, and shows what the total has done over a year. Finances is where the rest of the standing costs live alongside them, and the Expense Splitter is for the part this sheet only estimates — who has actually paid for which of them, which is a shared record rather than a URL.

• Subscriptions & Bills
• Finances
• Expense Splitter

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. This page stays free either way.

• Knowing what the household owns, and letting the rest of it go
• Seven questions to ask any family app before you put your household in it
• Split shared expenses and see who pays who
• Split rent and bills between housemates
• A home maintenance checklist for your house, grouped by season