#subscriptions

We ran $10/month vs $115/year (a 4.2% discount) through the present-value math at a 20% opportunity-cost rate — monthly billing wins, because deferring payment is worth more than the discount.

We ran a $16.99 family music plan split 6 ways against an $11.99 individual plan — $2.83 per person vs $11.99 comes to $659 in group savings a year, and just 2 people sharing already beats individual pricing.

Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, and Apple TV+ running year-round cost $887.40/year. Setting realistic seasonal active-months for each one dropped that to $331.80 — a 62% cut, no cancellations of things we'd actually miss.

A 2026 survey pegs the average household's forgotten-subscription waste at $384/year; a separate 2025 survey put it at $204. We ran two typical forgotten charges through the math and got $169.87 — below average, still real money.

Netflix Premium at $24.99 plus two extra members at $9.99 each comes to $44.97/month. Three separate Standard plans at $17.99 each would run $53.97/month. Sharing wins by $9/month — but the margin has gotten thin.

Streaming and SaaS prices have been climbing well above general inflation since the post-subscriber-growth phase began around 2022. We projected what a 6-12%/year hike rate compounds to.

A 2-year cycle buys five devices over a decade and sells four; a 4-year cycle buys three and sells two. Higher resale value on newer trade-ins doesn't fully offset the extra purchases.

The pattern repeats across every cloud provider: upgrade once when storage feels tight, then never re-check as old files get cleared out. We ran the actual cost-per-used-GB math.

The original cord-cutting math worked exactly once, when Netflix alone cost $9. We checked what re-fragmentation across Disney+, HBO Max, and sports add-ons actually did to the household total.

Every individual subscription feels small. That's exactly why almost nobody adds them up. We checked what $50/month actually becomes over 30 years once you count the invested-instead alternative.

The average US household runs 12 active subscriptions. The 2-3 you forgot about are usually $30-50/month. That's $13K-$26K of forgone investment growth over 20 years, just from the ones you weren't using.