Should you pay annually?
Almost every subscription offers a discount for paying a year up front, and almost none of them tells you what the discount is worth. This works it out from both prices as we read them — the monthly rate and the annual one — for every tool where we hold both. Where we have read one and not the other there is no answer here, only a note saying so.
Biggest savings on record
Ranked by the share of a year’s monthly bill that paying annually removes, computed from the two prices rather than the discount a vendor advertises.
Every tool we can answer this for
AI images
AI video
AI voice
AI writing
Accounting
Analytics
Business phone
CRM
Cloud storage
Course platforms
E-commerce
Email hosting
Email marketing
Form builders
Helpdesk
Hosting
Monitoring
Not yet categorised
Password manager
Project tools
SEO
Sales intelligence
Scheduling
Screen recording
Site builders
Video editing
Not yet read both ways — 147 tools.
These have a plan ladder on record, but only one billing state of it. Many pricing pages put the monthly and annual rates behind a toggle, and an unattended fetch only ever sees whichever state the page opens in, so for these we hold one side of the comparison and not the other. A saving worked out from one price and a guess at the other is not a smaller answer than the pages above, it is a different kind of thing, so it is not here: 10Web, ActiveCampaign, Activepieces, AdCreative, AI/ML API, Airtable, Akismet, Asana, AWeber, Backblaze, Basecamp, Benchmark Email, Better Stack, BigCommerce and 133 others.
No plan ladder on record — 16 tools. Nothing to compare either way yet.
Both figures read, still not comparable — 1 tool. ExpressVPN: the figure these publish as a monthly rate is a long commitment amortised — one of them prices 28 months and divides. Twelve of that is not a year of monthly billing, so the difference between it and the annual price is not a saving and is not shown as one.
A tool moves onto this page the day its second billing state is read, never before.