One-Time Price vs Monthly Subscription: The Real Three-Year Cost

Why a small monthly number is the easiest one to underestimate

Checked 26 September 2026: a genuine, well-documented pattern in how people judge cost is worth naming plainly here - a recurring payment, split into small monthly instalments, is judged as less significant than the same total amount presented as one lump sum, even when the two are mathematically identical or the recurring version is actually larger. A £39-a-month subscription feels, in the moment of paying it, like a minor, easily-absorbed cost - considerably smaller than the feeling of handing over £99 all at once. The honest arithmetic runs the other way entirely, and this piece exists to lay it out plainly rather than let the monthly framing do the persuading on its own.

The year-by-year numbers, laid out plainly

At the 500-listing basis used throughout this comparison series, AutoDS's Starter plan costs $39.90 a month - $478.80 across a single year. Hustle Got Real's Pro plan costs £39 a month - £468 across a year. Easync's Basic plan costs $49.99 a month - $599.88 across a year. Sellhelm's Solo licence costs £99, once, covering the same job with no listing cap, and no second payment ever required for that same PC. Already, within the first twelve months, every one of the three subscriptions has cost several times the entire one-time price of Sellhelm - not a close comparison narrowly won, but a genuinely large gap visible from year one alone.

Three years, in full, for all four

Extending the same figures across three years - the period this whole comparison series uses as its standard horizon - AutoDS's Starter plan reaches $1,436.40. Hustle Got Real's Pro plan reaches £1,404. Easync's Basic plan reaches $1,799.64. Sellhelm remains at £99 total, for the entire three-year period, having been paid once at the very start of it. However the exact figures move around between these three subscription competitors, the shape is identical in all three cases: a cost that keeps accumulating for as long as the shop keeps running, set against one that stopped accumulating the day it was paid.

What five years actually shows, if a shop lasts that long

Our piece on is eBay dropshipping still worth it in 2026 covers the honest realism around how long a shop like this typically runs - a genuine, successful shop very plausibly operates for five years or considerably longer, not the twelve-to-eighteen-month window a shorter comparison might imply is the natural horizon. Across five years, AutoDS's Starter plan reaches $2,394. Hustle Got Real's Pro plan reaches £2,340. Easync's Basic plan reaches $2,999.40 - very nearly $3,000, on a plan whose monthly price is under $50. Sellhelm remains at £99, the identical figure it was on day one, regardless of whether the shop is closed within a year or is still running a decade later.

Do the annual-billing discounts actually change this picture?

Two of the three subscription tools offer a real discount for paying annually rather than monthly, worth factoring in honestly rather than ignored. AutoDS's 25% annual discount brings its effective monthly rate down meaningfully, though the three-year total still runs well into four figures in dollars. Hustle Got Real's up to 40% annual discount is larger still - but its own terms make annual plans non-refundable, a genuine, separate risk worth weighing on its own terms, covered in more depth in our piece on Sellhelm vs Hustle Got Real. Neither discount changes the fundamental shape of the comparison - a discounted recurring cost is still a recurring cost, accumulating for as long as the subscription continues, where a one-time price stops accumulating the moment it is paid.

A subscription is also a bet that the price stays where it is

Every one of these three companies is free to raise its own published price at any time, the same way eBay's own fee card has genuinely changed more than once across the period this blog has been written. A seller committing to a monthly subscription is, in effect, betting that the rate they signed up at stays roughly where it is for as long as they keep using the tool - a bet that has, in practice, not always held across this industry, and one a one-time purchase simply does not require making at all. Sellhelm's own one-time price, once paid, cannot retroactively rise on a licence already bought - the licence covers the version bought and every future 4.x update, at no further cost, regardless of what Sellhelm's own current price for a new customer happens to be by then.

The genuine, honest case for a subscription anyway

None of the above is an argument that a subscription is always the wrong choice - a fair comparison names its honest merits too. A seller with genuine uncertainty about whether their shop will even still exist in three months has a real, practical reason to prefer a monthly commitment over a larger one-time payment, precisely because it can be abandoned quickly and cheaply if the whole approach doesn't work out. A seller needing a capability only available from a subscription tool - genuine multi-marketplace reach, a huge product-research catalogue - is choosing based on what the tool actually does, not simply the pricing model it happens to use, and the pricing model itself becomes secondary to that more important decision.

Why "you can cancel anytime" understates the real cost too

A subscription's ability to be cancelled at any time is genuinely true, and it is worth being honest that in practice it rarely offsets the calculation above the way it first appears to. Cancelling a subscription tool that a shop has been actively using for two years means either replacing it with something else - itself a real, if smaller, cost in time and disruption - or reverting to a manual process the tool had been doing automatically, which is its own genuine cost even if no money changes hands for it directly. "You can cancel anytime" is a true statement about the billing relationship; it says nothing about how easily a shop can actually function without a tool it has come to depend on, which is the more relevant question once a seller has been using one for any meaningful length of time.

Why this comparison applies specifically to the tools it names

It's worth being precise that this piece is not a general argument against every subscription of any kind - it applies specifically to the comparison this whole series is built around: a stock-management tool doing a genuinely comparable job across a one-time and a recurring pricing model. A subscription for something that itself changes meaningfully over time - live market data that updates constantly, for instance - is a different kind of product entirely, where ongoing payment reasonably reflects ongoing, active work being done on the seller's behalf every month, not simply access to software that, once built, does not fundamentally change in what it delivers month to month.

The real question this piece is actually trying to answer

The honest point of laying all this out is not "subscriptions are bad" - it is that the true cost of a monthly plan is easy to underestimate specifically because it never presents itself as one large number the way a one-time price does. A seller weighing these options fairly should look at the three-year or five-year total, not the monthly figure alone, before deciding - the monthly number is real, but it is also, by its very nature as a monthly number, the version of this decision most likely to be judged too lightly.

The real psychology behind why this works, named properly

The pattern described above has a real name in behavioural economics: mental accounting, a concept developed by the economist Richard Thaler, describes how people mentally sort money into separate categories rather than treating it as one single, fungible total - a £39 "monthly software cost" sits in a different mental bucket to a £99 "one-off purchase," even when both are drawn from the identical bank account and the same monthly budget. Subscription pricing, across almost every industry that uses it, benefits directly from this same effect - not through deception, simply through how the human mind naturally processes a small, recurring number differently from a single larger one, even when the recurring number is mathematically the larger commitment over time.

The money itself, sitting somewhere else in the meantime

A further, practical angle worth including: money not spent on a recurring subscription is money still available for something else in the meantime - stock, a returns buffer, or simply a calmer cash position for a small, self-funded shop. A one-time £99 payment, made once, frees up every subsequent month's worth of what would otherwise have been a recurring bill, for a seller to direct toward whatever the shop actually needs most at that point, rather than a fixed, recurring commitment locked in regardless of how the shop's own priorities shift over time.

A worked example

A seller choosing between Easync's Basic plan and a Sellhelm Solo licence, weighing "$49.99 a month" against "£99 once," makes a very different decision than one weighing "$1,800 across three years" against "£99, once, ever." The first framing makes $49.99 sound like the smaller, easier commitment; the second framing - mathematically identical, simply presented honestly across the timeframe the shop will actually exist for - makes the real gap between the two unmistakable. Nothing about the underlying software changed between the two framings. Only the honesty of the timeframe did.

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