Annual billing looks cheaper. Here is the month it actually becomes cheaper.

Sarah Mitchell — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:02:58 +0000

Every SaaS checkout offers the same trade: pay for a year up front, get two months free. It reads as a discount. It is really a bet that you will still want the tool in month ten.

Here is the arithmetic I run before taking it.

Monthly cost = monthly price x seats
Annual cost = annual price x seats, paid on day one
Break-even = annual cost / monthly cost

If a tool is $50 a month or $500 a year for one seat, the annual deal costs ten months of the monthly plan. Month ten is where it turns into a saving. Cancel in month seven and you paid $500 for $350 of use.

Three things move that number and none of them are on the pricing page.

Seat minimums. If the plan sells in rungs of five and you need twelve people, you are buying fifteen, so the real crossover is later than the per-seat math suggests.

Add-ons that run out. Trial credit grants are the current favourite. A CRM can advertise thousands of AI credits on a mid plan and, in its own documentation, call that a one-time grant rather than a monthly allowance. When it runs out, the feature you signed up for stops until you buy more.

Renaming. Plans get renamed more often than they get repriced, and half the comparison articles online still quote the old names. Check the vendor's own page on the day you buy.

I got tired of rebuilding this in a spreadsheet, so it is a free tool now. Give it a monthly price, an annual price and your seat count and it returns the break-even month, with no sign-up.

The rule I settled on: if the break-even month is further out than your confidence in still using the tool, pay monthly and lose the discount. The discount is smaller than the write-off.

I stopped rebuilding the same SaaS ROI spreadsheet and made a calculator instead

Sarah Mitchell — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 07:32:16 +0000

Every time I evaluated a tool I rebuilt the same spreadsheet:
seats x cost per seat, minus hours saved x hourly rate, over
twelve months.

So I turned it into a page. You enter seats, cost per seat,
hours saved per week and an hourly rate, and it returns ROI %,
net annual value, payback period and total hours saved per year.

Free, no sign-up, nothing stored on a server — it saves to your
browser so you can come back to it:
SaaS ROI Calculator]

Two things surprised me. Most tools pay back faster than people
assume once you price the hours honestly. And almost nobody
prices the hours honestly.

How do you decide whether a subscription is worth keeping — gut
feel, or do you run the numbers?

DEV Community: Sarah Mitchell

Annual billing looks cheaper. Here is the month it actually becomes cheaper.

I stopped rebuilding the same SaaS ROI spreadsheet and made a calculator instead