A small desk with one question: what does this actually cost you a year, and what does it renew at? We read the fine print so the answer is a number and not a vibe.
Last revised
The Yearly Bill exists because of a specific, common annoyance: you sign up for something at a price you were happy with, and eleven months later you are charged a different price you never agreed to look at. Nobody sends you a summary. The email arrives after the card is charged.
So this desk does one narrow job. For each thing you pay for, we record what it costs, what it costs per year once you do the multiplication the vendor would rather you didn't, what it renews at where the vendor publishes a renewal price, and what the free tier actually includes. Then we date all of it.
Streaming, cloud storage, password managers, VPNs, AI subscriptions, meal kits and music, which are the categories where recurring charges quietly compound. We also cover health and fitness apps, less often, because they are priced like software and bought like a New Year's resolution — a combination that produces a lot of forgotten annual renewals.
We check four things and only four: the headline price, the yearly equivalent, the renewal price, and the free tier. That is the whole remit.
We do not review product quality. We have no opinion on which streaming service has the better back catalogue, which VPN is fastest, or which food app has the nicest interface. Those are real questions and there are good sites that answer them. If you arrive here wanting to know whether something is worth buying, we can only tell you the half of that question that has a number attached.
We also do not print a price we have not read. Where a vendor does not publish a renewal price, the column says Not published and stays that way until somebody at this desk sees a figure with their own eyes. An empty column is information. A guess dressed as a figure is not, and on a site about prices it is the single worst thing we could do.
That is not a moral position so much as a practical one. A desk that earns a commission on sign-ups cannot credibly tell you the thing costs too much, and the moment a reader suspects the ranking is for sale, every number on the site becomes worthless. Outbound links go to the vendor's own homepage because that is where you would go to check us.
When a price changes. Not weekly, not monthly, not to a content calendar. If a category sits still for four months you will see nothing from us about it for four months, and that silence is accurate reporting. The corollary is that when we do post, something moved.
Editor
Has read something in the region of 400 consumer subscription agreements end to end, schedules included. Started keeping a household renewal calendar in 2019 after being billed twice in one month by the same company for two different products; that calendar is more or less what this desk grew out of.
Staff writer, software and security
Maintains a working file of first-term versus renewal pricing for around sixty consumer security and software products, rebuilt each quarter from vendor checkout pages rather than from press releases, because the two disagree more often than you would expect.
Contributing writer, recurring charges
Reads terms of service in Spanish and English, which turns out to matter more than it sounds — the same subscription is frequently priced, discounted and renewed on different terms in the two markets, and the English page is not always the stricter one.
Nobody here has a stock headshot, because nobody here has been photographed for this. You get initials and a working history instead, which tells you more about whether to trust a price check anyway.
We will. Prices change without notice, regional pricing differs, and a figure that was right on the day we read it can be wrong a fortnight later. Every correction we make is logged with a date and a description of what was wrong, in the corrections log, and we do not quietly edit a number and pretend it was always that. If you have found something wrong, the log explains how to tell us.
The full method — where prices are read from, why they are regional, how often we go back and look again — is on how we check prices.