Is it cheaper to pay for software annually or monthly?

Across 34 tools that publish both a monthly and an annual rate, the median discount for paying yearly is 20%, ranging from 6% to 65%.

The trap is which number you are looking at. Most vendors default the toggle to annual and print it as a monthly figure, so a price scraped from the page is often the committed rate rather than the flexible one. We hit this four times in a single verification pass, and each time the tool looked like it had cut its price:

• Instantly — $47/mo is the monthly rate; the $37 widely quoted is the same Growth plan billed annually.
• Kit — $39/mo and $33/mo are the same Creator plan billed monthly or yearly, not a price cut.
• Later — $25/mo monthly, $18.75 billed yearly — the same Starter plan.
• Otter.ai — $16.99 monthly and $8.33 annual are the same Pro plan.

Any comparison that does not name its billing period should be treated as unreliable rather than merely imprecise.

Computed from DigiJaws’ pricing dataset of 252 tools, each figure read from the vendor’s own pricing page on a recorded date. The data is open at /pricing-data.json.