// About CostInHours.com
Most financial tools tell you how much something costs in dollars. We tell you what it costs in the only currency that actually matters — your time.
Every purchase you make has two price tags. The first is the dollar amount on the receipt. The second — the one nobody shows you — is how many hours of your life you had to trade to pay for it, and what that money could have become if you'd invested it instead.
A $6 daily coffee isn't just $6. At a $20/hr wage, that's 18 minutes of your life. Multiply by 365 days and that's 109 hours per year — nearly 14 full working days — just to fund one habit. Over 30 years, invested at an 8% average market return, that coffee becomes over $245,000.
CostInHours.com was built to make that second price tag impossible to ignore.
Any purchase, subscription, or recurring habit — daily coffee, gym membership, car payment. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or one-time.
Using your hourly wage, we calculate exactly how many hours of your life you traded to fund this expense. Hours become days, days become years.
Using an 8% average annual market return — the widely cited long-term average of diversified index funds — we show what that money could have compounded to over time.
CostInHours.com is and always will be free to use. No sign-up, no paywall, no email required to see your results. The site is supported by Google AdSense display advertising.
We don't store your calculations, we don't track what you enter, and we don't sell your data. Everything runs in your browser. See our Privacy Policy for full details.
The 8% investment return is used for illustrative purposes only and does not represent a guarantee of future returns. CostInHours.com is not a financial advisor. Always consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions.