Streaming Service Overlap Calculator: Which Subscriptions Are You Barely Using?

Charlie was scrolling through the TV guide app on a Tuesday night trying to find something to watch, when he noticed a row for a streaming service he genuinely could not remember signing up for. He opened his banking app to check. There it was, £6.99 a month, going out every month for what turned out to be nearly a year. He’d subscribed for a single documentary series, watched it in a weekend, and then simply never got round to cancelling.

That’s roughly £70 for a service he’d opened once. Not a disaster on its own, but Charlie also had Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ running at the same time, and he’d never once sat down and worked out how much all of them together were actually costing him, let alone whether he was watching enough of any of them to justify the price.

The average UK household with three or more streaming services is spending somewhere between £400 and £800 per year on them. A real chunk of that is going on services people barely watch, content they could get elsewhere in their existing lineup, and subscriptions kept alive by inertia rather than genuine use. This tool shows you the real cost per hour of each service, which is the only number that actually tells you whether a subscription is worth keeping.

Who Is This Calculator For?

This tool is useful for anyone paying for more than one streaming service. It is particularly helpful if you are:

• Someone who pays for four or more streaming services and has a nagging sense that a couple of them are not really earning their monthly fee, but has never sat down to work out which ones
• Anyone who subscribed for a specific show, finished it, and is still paying months later because cancelling was one of those things that never quite happened
• A household where different family members have different favourite services and the combined monthly total has crept up without anyone consciously deciding to spend that much
• Someone who signs up to free trials and does not always cancel in time, meaning one or two months of paying for something they intended to be free happens a few times per year
• Anyone who wants to understand cost per hour watched rather than just the monthly price, because the expensive service you actually watch every evening is often better value than the cheap service you forget you have
• Someone trying to apply a subscription audit to their finances and wanting a structured tool that covers all the major UK streaming services in one place

Who Is This Calculator Not Suitable For?

• Anyone looking for content recommendations. The calculator compares cost and usage efficiency, not programme quality. Whether a specific show is worth watching is a different question entirely and not one a cost calculator can answer.
• Anyone wanting a precise monthly figure. The calculator works on your estimates of how many hours per week you watch each service. It produces a realistic annual figure based on your inputs rather than pulling from your actual viewing history. Your streaming service apps can show real watch time in their account settings if you want the exact figure.

How to Use the Calculator

Set your annual streaming budget using the slider, what you genuinely intend to spend across all services combined. Set the exceed slider based on how reliably you stay within that budget. Add your time value and how many minutes per session you spend scrolling for something to watch before actually watching.

Toggle on every streaming service you currently pay for. For each, enter the monthly cost, how many hours per week you genuinely watch it, how much you actually use it on the usage scale, and the honest reason you are subscribed, whether that is regular use, a specific show, FOMO, or the fact that you forgot to cancel.

Answer the five behavioural questions about free trial conversions, content overlap, hype-driven signups, forgetting to cancel after a show ends, and choice paralysis. These feed into your efficiency score and shape the rotation strategy recommendation.

The results show your annual total, how much goes on barely-used services, average cost per hour watched across all services, a per-service breakdown bar chart, and a personalised rotation strategy if the numbers support one.

How Much Does the Average UK Household Spend on Streaming Per Year?

The figure is higher than most people think, and it has risen sharply over the past three years as streaming services have moved away from introductory pricing and raised their rates repeatedly.

Research from Kantar in 2024 found that the average UK household subscribes to 3.2 paid streaming services at once. At UK 2025 pricing, Netflix Standard at £17.99, Amazon Prime at £8.99, Disney+ Standard at £4.99, and a fourth service averaging around £7, the combined monthly cost is around £38 to £45, or £456 to £540 per year before accounting for any add-ons or premium plan upgrades.

Ofcom’s 2024 Media Nations report found that 18 percent of UK adults pay for five or more subscription video on demand services. At that level, before counting NOW, Paramount+, Hayu, YouTube Premium, or any sports add-ons, the annual total easily exceeds £700.

Research from Lloyds Bank found that streaming subscriptions were one of the top three categories where UK adults consistently underestimated their spending, partly because the charges are small individually, partly because they arrive on different dates throughout the month, and partly because many are paid annually and felt as a single transaction rather than a recurring one.

The Cost Per Hour Problem: Why Monthly Price Is the Wrong Number to Compare

Monthly subscription price is the number everyone uses to evaluate streaming value. It is also the least useful number for that purpose.

Consider two services. Service A costs £17.99 per month. Service B costs £4.99 per month. On face value Service B is obviously better value. But if you watch Service A for 30 hours per week and Service B for 30 minutes, the cost per hour tells a completely different story.

Service A at 30 hours per week costs around 10 pence per hour watched. Service B at 30 minutes per week costs around £2.30 per hour watched, twenty-three times more expensive per unit of actual viewing.

This is why the calculator prioritises cost per hour as the primary output for each service rather than the monthly fee. A £17.99 per month service used heavily is a bargain. A £4.99 per month service you barely open is expensive. The sticker price tells you neither of these things.

The cost-per-hour calculation is straightforward. Take the monthly cost, divide it by the number of hours you watch per month, and the result is what each hour of viewing is actually costing you. For services you watch daily the figure is typically under 25 pence per hour, comparable to other entertainment costs. For services you open once a month the figure typically runs to several pounds per hour, which is far more expensive than a cinema ticket per hour of entertainment.

The calculator shows this figure for every service you add, colour-coded from excellent value to poor value, which makes the comparison between your services immediate and concrete.

The Streaming Subscription Creep Problem

Subscription creep is the gradual build-up of recurring charges that each seemed reasonable when they were added but collectively represent a large annual total. Streaming services are one of the most common drivers of subscription creep in UK households.

The pattern typically follows a consistent sequence. You subscribe to a service for a specific show that everyone is talking about. You watch the show, enjoy it, and continue using the service for a while. A few months later your usage has dropped but you have not cancelled. Then another service launches a must-watch series and you add that one too. And so on.

Research from Barclays in 2023 found that the average UK adult spends around £620 per year on subscriptions of all types, with streaming services making up the largest single category. The research also found that 46 percent of UK adults were paying for at least one subscription they had forgotten about entirely or were no longer actively using.

The “forgot to cancel” pattern is particularly expensive in streaming. Most services now charge monthly in advance, meaning a cancellation that happens a week late still costs a full month’s fee. For someone who signs up for a free trial and misses the cancellation window two or three times per year, the annual cost of that habit is £15 to £30 in charges for services they genuinely intended to cancel.

The calculator’s free trial conversion question captures this specifically, adding the estimated annual cost of missed cancellations to the total.

Netflix Prices in 2025: What You Are Actually Paying

Netflix has raised its UK prices multiple times since 2020 and the current pricing structure reflects a large step up from what long-term subscribers were used to paying.

The Standard with Ads plan at £4.99 per month is the cheapest option and includes advertising breaks during content. The Standard plan without ads costs £17.99 per month for two simultaneous streams. The Premium plan at £22.99 per month adds 4K streaming and a fourth simultaneous stream.

The household sharing rule introduced in 2023 means that people sharing a standard or premium account with someone who does not live at the same address are required to pay an extra member fee or subscribe to their own plan. Research from Kantar found that Netflix’s subscriber numbers in the UK initially dropped when the sharing crackdown was announced but recovered quickly as people moved to individual subscriptions.

At £17.99 per month, Netflix costs £215.88 per year, a meaningful standalone expense for what is now just one of several streaming options available. Whether this is good value depends entirely on how many hours of content you actually watch on it each month. The calculator shows you this figure precisely.

Disney+ and the Bundle Problem

Disney+ occupies a specific position in the streaming landscape that makes its value calculation more complex than most other services. At £4.99 per month for the Standard plan it appears cheap. But Disney+’s content library, while deep in certain areas, the Marvel catalogue, Star Wars, Pixar, Disney Animation, and National Geographic, is thinner than Netflix or Amazon in others.

The result is that Disney+ tends to be watched in bursts rather than continuously. A household with children watches heavily during school holidays. An adult subscriber watches all the Marvel and Star Wars content and then has far less reason to open the app. Research from Kantar found that Disney+ had the highest “subscription pause” rate of any major streaming service in the UK, meaning subscribers cancelled and resubscribed more often than those of other platforms.

This burst-watching pattern means that the annual average cost per hour for Disney+ is often higher than the low monthly price suggests, because the hours are front-loaded into periods of heavy use with long gaps of near-zero usage in between.

The calculator captures this honestly through the usage rating and hours per week inputs, which average the viewing across the year rather than just the peak months.

What Is the “One Show” Trap?

The one-show subscription is one of the most common and most financially inefficient streaming habits in the UK.

It follows a simple pattern: a series on a platform you do not currently subscribe to generates a lot of social buzz. You sign up to watch it. You watch it over two or three weeks. You intend to cancel after finishing. You do not cancel. Six months later you are still paying for the service and opening it perhaps once or twice a month without finding anything compelling enough to commit to.

Research from Ampere Analysis found that in the UK, 23 percent of streaming subscribers described at least one of their current subscriptions as being kept primarily because of a single show or franchise rather than the general library.

The financial cost of the one-show trap is the full annual subscription cost for a service you are using at a fraction of its capacity. At £6.99 per month for a service you open twice a month for 40 minutes each time, you are paying around £2.18 per hour watched. At the same rate of use on Netflix you would be paying around £3.60 per hour. Both are far more expensive per hour than a service you genuinely watch daily.

The calculator’s “why are you subscribed” dropdown for each service specifically includes “mainly for one show” as an option, which flags the service in the cancellation candidates section and factors it into the efficiency score.

The Choice Paralysis Tax: How Much Do You Pay for Scrolling?

This is the streaming cost nobody ever counts, and research has found it is real.

Research from Nielsen found that UK streaming viewers spend an average of 20 minutes per session searching for something to watch before committing to content. At two or three viewing sessions per week across a year, this means spending somewhere between 35 and 50 hours per year scrolling through streaming menus without watching anything.

This is a time cost. At even a modest hourly rate of £13, the UK minimum wage in 2025, 40 hours of browsing time is worth £520. This does not mean you should assign a direct financial cost to relaxing in front of the television. It does mean that having more services with more content does not necessarily solve the browsing problem. It often makes it worse.

Research from the University of Amsterdam found that having a larger pool of choices consistently increased the time spent deciding and decreased satisfaction with the eventual choice made. More streaming services means more content to scroll through, more potential decision points, and a longer average time to actually start watching something.

The calculator’s browsing time input quantifies this specifically, multiplying the minutes per session by the number of sessions implied by your viewing habits and converting it to an annual time cost at your stated hourly rate.

The Subscription Rotation Strategy: Pay for One at a Time

The most financially efficient approach to streaming that most people never adopt is rotating subscriptions rather than holding them all at once.

The rotation strategy works as follows. Identify the two or three services you use most consistently. Keep those year-round. For the remaining services, the ones you watch in bursts around specific content, subscribe for one or two months when there is something specific you want to watch, then cancel and resubscribe when the next season arrives or a new show of interest launches.

Most streaming services make this easier than it sounds. Cancellation is typically instant and takes under two minutes. Resubscription is equally quick. There is no penalty for returning, and in some cases services run promotional pricing for returning subscribers.

Research from consumer group Which? found that someone rotating between four streaming services, holding two at once and swapping the others in and out over the course of a year, spent around £180 to £240 per year compared to £480 to £600 for someone holding all four at once, while accessing the same content they were actually interested in.

The calculator’s rotation strategy section generates a specific recommendation based on which of your services you rate as least-used, showing the annual saving from rotating those services rather than maintaining them continuously.

Family Plans and Shared Accounts: The Most Underused Saving

One of the simplest ways to reduce the per-person cost of streaming is also one of the most commonly overlooked, making sure you are on the right plan for your household.

Netflix’s Premium plan at £22.99 per month supports four simultaneous streams and up to four active profiles. For a household of four people who would otherwise each pay for an individual Standard plan at £17.99, the Premium family plan saves £49 per month. Even with two people sharing a Premium plan, the saving over two individual Standard plans is around £13 per month.

Disney+ Standard at £4.99 allows streaming on four devices at once. Amazon Prime, which at £8.99 per month also includes free delivery and various other benefits, can be shared within a household.

The calculator does not currently calculate family plan savings automatically because the household structure varies too much to generalise cleanly, but the tips section flags this if you have multiple subscriptions, and it is worth reviewing your plan tier for each service you hold.

How to Reduce Streaming Costs Without Missing Anything

• Set a cancellation reminder on the day you sign up for any free trial. Not at the end of the trial period, the day you sign up, while it is fresh. A calendar entry two days before the trial ends catches it before a charge goes through, regardless of how busy you are when it expires.
• Rotate rather than accumulate. Identify your two most-watched services and keep those. For everything else, subscribe for the specific content you want, watch it, and cancel. Most services take under two minutes to cancel and resubscription is equally fast when something new of interest comes out.
• Check your actual watch time before renewing. Most streaming services show your viewing history in account settings. If a service has less than 20 to 30 hours of your watch time in a month, the cost per hour is likely high enough to justify reconsidering it.
• Review your plan tier for every service. Paying for a Premium plan when you only ever use one screen at a time is paying for capacity you never use. Dropping to Standard on services where you do not need multiple simultaneous streams saves money immediately.
• Look at what free options cover. BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4 on Demand, and YouTube carry a large volume of UK content for free with a TV licence or free account. Before adding a new paid service, it is worth checking whether any of the content you want is already available on services you are not paying for.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does the average UK household spend on streaming per year?

Research from Kantar in 2024 found UK households subscribe to an average of 3.2 paid streaming services. At current 2025 UK pricing, three mainstream services, Netflix Standard, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, cost around £31 to £38 per month combined, or £370 to £460 per year. Households with four or more services typically spend £480 to £700 per year. Use the calculator for a figure based on your actual subscriptions and usage.

How do I calculate cost per hour of a streaming service?

Divide the monthly subscription cost by the total hours you watch the service per month. Netflix Standard at £17.99 per month watched for 30 hours per month costs around 60 pence per hour. The same service watched for two hours per month costs £9 per hour. The calculator does this automatically for each service once you enter the monthly cost and your weekly viewing hours.

Is it worth having multiple streaming services?

It depends on how much you actually watch each one. A service you use daily at even a high price point can be excellent value per hour. A cheap service you open once or twice a month is expensive per hour of actual viewing. The cost-per-hour figure for each service in the calculator gives you the specific answer for your household rather than a general rule.

What is the most cost-effective streaming service in the UK?

It varies by viewing habits. Amazon Prime Video at £8.99 per month is often cited as good value because the subscription also includes free delivery and other benefits, spreading the cost across multiple uses. For heavy daily viewers, any service used regularly is likely to deliver a cost per hour well below £1. For light users, all services are expensive per hour regardless of their price.

How much does Netflix cost per year in the UK in 2025?

Netflix UK pricing in 2025 is £4.99 per month for Standard with Ads, £17.99 per month for Standard without ads, and £22.99 per month for Premium. The most popular Standard plan costs £215.88 per year.

What is subscription rotation and does it work?

Subscription rotation is the practice of keeping only your most-used services year-round and subscribing to others for one or two months when there is specific content you want to watch, then cancelling until the next time. Research from Which? found that rotating users spent £180 to £240 per year on the same services that simultaneous subscribers paid £480 to £600 for, accessing the same content they were actually interested in. The calculator’s rotation strategy section recommends specific services to rotate based on your usage ratings.

Who built this calculator?

The Savzz Streaming Service Overlap Calculator was built by the team at Savzz.co.uk, a UK money-saving and discount code site. We build free, practical tools designed to give honest, useful answers to questions about time and cost. We built it because streaming subscriptions are one of the most consistent and least-examined slow drains on UK household budgets. The cost-per-hour output for each individual service, the efficiency score, and the personalised rotation strategy are all features no other free streaming calculator includes. It is completely free to use with no sign-up required.

Final Thoughts

Streaming subscriptions feel small when you look at them one by one. A few pounds here, a mid-range plan there, a free trial that rolled over. None of them seem like a meaningful cost in isolation. The picture only changes when you put them side by side and compare what you pay with how much you actually watch. That is where the real value, or lack of it, becomes visible.

This calculator brings that picture into focus. It shows your annual total, your cost per hour for each service, the subscriptions that quietly take money without giving much back, and the ones that genuinely earn their place. For many people, the cost-per-hour figure is the moment everything clicks, because it reveals which services are delivering daily value and which ones are simply sitting in the background on autopay.

If your numbers look higher than expected, that is normal. Most households underestimate their streaming spend because the charges are scattered, small, and easy to forget. The useful part is what you do next, whether that is rotating services, cancelling the ones you barely use, or simply being more deliberate about what you keep. A few small changes can reduce your annual total by a good amount without reducing the content you actually enjoy.