What your tools cost you a year, added up

Nobody decides to spend a thousand dollars a year on utilities. It arrives one eight-dollar decision at a time, each of them obviously worth it on the day, and then it renews quietly for as long as the card works.

So here is the arithmetic, done properly, for the ten jobs a person doing ordinary desk work ends up paying for.

the bill

Rules these numbers were collected under, because a comparison is worth nothing if you cannot check it: each vendor’s own pricing page, in USD, the cheapest paid plan for one person billed yearly, Windows only, all checked on 13 Sep 2026.

Every year. Not one of those prices is unreasonable for what that app does - that is exactly why the total gets to where it gets.

how ordinary desktop jobs became rent

Dictation, screen recording, PDF conversion, file transcoding - these ran on a desktop computer twenty years ago, bought once, working offline. They did not become subscriptions because they started needing a server. They became subscriptions because subscriptions are a better business.

And for a while there was a real technical reason in some of them: speech recognition genuinely was too heavy for a laptop, so it had to run in a data centre, and a data centre has a monthly bill. That reason expired. A speech model that transcribes a sentence in under a second now runs on a four-core laptop CPU. The pricing model outlived its justification.

the test that tells you which is which

Not every subscription is rent for something your computer could do. The question worth asking about each line on your own bill: does this job actually need a server?

Where the answer is yes, a subscription is honest: something is running for you, continuously, and it costs money to keep running. Where the answer is no, you are renting a licence to use your own processor.

what a subscription genuinely buys

Being fair about this matters, because the opposite argument is usually made dishonestly:

• Development that continues. A one-time purchase funds the version you bought. Plenty of bought-once software has been abandoned.
• Support by a person. Cheap software mostly means a docs page and an issue tracker.
• Teams and sharing, which genuinely do need infrastructure.
• The very best accuracy, in speech and image work, still tends to be a model too big to run at home.

If you need those, pay for them. The waste is not subscriptions as such - it is paying a monthly fee, forever, for a job that finishes on your own machine in four seconds.

doing something about it, in an evening

1. List what actually renewed. Card statement or app store subscriptions, twelve months back. The forgotten ones are usually the expensive part.
2. Mark the ones you used in the last month. Not “would use” - used.
3. For each of the rest, ask whether the job needs a server. If not, there is almost certainly something that does it on your machine - often free and open source.
4. Cancel at the renewal date, not today. You have already paid to the end of the term.

You will not replace all ten and it is not worth pretending otherwise. Getting three of them off the list is several hundred dollars a year and one fewer password.

Who wrote this. We build owntools, so we are plainly not neutral about the conclusion. The numbers are the reason to publish it anyway: they are from each vendor’s own pricing page on 13 Sep 2026, the rules for picking them are stated above, and prices drift - so check any line that matters to you before you act on it.