The Math on Planned Obsolescence: How Much Enshittification Costs the Average American Per Year
Nobody budgets for enshittification. It doesn't appear on your bank statement as a line item. It hides in the space between what a product used to do and what it does now — in the printer cartridge that stopped working after a firmware update, in the smart speaker that lost half its features when the company pivoted, in the phone that slowed down after two years of software updates you couldn't decline.
We decided to try to quantify it. Not perfectly — the data is scattered, corporate disclosures are opaque, and some costs are nearly impossible to attribute cleanly to intentional degradation versus normal wear. But the rough math is damning enough to be worth doing.
Our estimate: the average American household pays somewhere between $1,200 and $2,800 per year in costs that are directly attributable to planned obsolescence, subscription lock-in, and post-purchase product degradation. Here's how we got there.
Component 1: Shortened Smartphone Lifespans — ~$180–$320/year
Americans replace their smartphones on average every 2.5 to 3 years, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners data. The average selling price of a smartphone in the US is approximately $500, weighted across the full market including budget and flagship devices.
At a 2.7-year replacement cycle and $500 average price: $185/year in smartphone depreciation costs.
How much of that is enshittification? Conservatively, a well-maintained smartphone — one not subjected to performance throttling, manufactured with available replacement batteries, and supported with security updates for a reasonable duration — should last 5 to 6 years. Apple's own internal data, revealed during the Batterygate litigation, showed that a significant portion of iPhone replacements were driven by battery degradation and performance throttling rather than hardware failure.
If the average American kept their phone 5 years instead of 2.7, the annual cost would drop to roughly $100. The delta — $80–$220/year — is a reasonable estimate of what shortened smartphone lifespans cost per household.
This understates the true figure. It doesn't account for cases where consumers bought new phones specifically because an update made their existing device unusably slow, which the FTC settlement data suggests happened to millions of iPhone users.
Component 2: Subscription Creep on Hardware You Already Own — ~$240–$600/year
This is the fastest-growing component of enshittification costs, and the one most people don't consciously track.
Consider what a household that bought reasonable smart devices in 2018 now pays in subscriptions that didn't exist at time of purchase:
- Ring doorbell: Ring Protect Plan, $100/year, required for video history access. At launch, 60 days of video history was included free. Changed in 2020.
- Nest thermostat: Nest Aware subscription, $60–$120/year, required for full feature access including some features present at original purchase.
- iRobot Roomba: iRobot OS subscription, $100/year, required for some mapping and scheduling features on newer models.
- Smart TV apps: While the TV itself doesn't require a subscription, the ad-funded streaming services that replaced cable have collectively extracted $86/month average from US households, per Nielsen data — a category that barely existed when most current TVs were purchased.
- Fitness trackers: Fitbit Premium ($80/year), Whoop membership ($239/year), Apple Fitness+ ($80/year) — features that were historically included free in competitor devices are now subscription-gated across the category.
A household with a Ring camera, a Nest device, and a fitness tracker is paying roughly $240–$360/year in subscriptions on hardware they've already purchased. Add one premium fitness platform and you're at $500–$600.
This figure has approximately tripled since 2018, driven almost entirely by companies converting one-time hardware purchases into recurring revenue vehicles through post-purchase firmware changes.
Component 3: Printer Ink and Cartridge Lock-In — ~$80–$200/year
HP estimates that American households spend an average of $120/year on printer ink. The actual cost of the ink itself — the pigmented liquid, divorced from the proprietary cartridge, the DRM chip, and the firmware enforcement — is closer to $2–$5 per equivalent cartridge.
The markup on HP ink, calculated by volume, is approximately 3,400%. This is not a market inefficiency. It is the explicit business model, protected by firmware updates that disable third-party cartridges and software that reports cartridge levels to HP's servers.
Third-party compatible cartridges — where they work — reduce ink costs by 60–80%. The delta between what households pay under lock-in and what they would pay in an open market: $70–$190/year.
For households that own HP+ enrolled printers — a program that permanently locks the printer to HP cartridges for its lifetime in exchange for an initial discount — there is no exit. The lock-in cost compounds annually for the life of the device.
Component 4: Appliance Replacement Driven by Repairability Failure — ~$120–$400/year
The average American household replaces a major appliance every 4.8 years, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. In 1970, the average lifespan of a washing machine was 14 years. Today it's 10 years for a top-loader and 8 years for a front-loader.
The primary driver of shortened appliance lifespans isn't mechanical failure — it's repairability. The introduction of touchscreen interfaces, proprietary circuit boards, and software-dependent control systems has created appliances where a $15 electronic control module failure requires either a $300 repair call (because the part isn't available to consumers) or a full replacement.
Average major appliance cost: ~$800. At a 10-year lifespan versus the historical 14-year lifespan: the household pays $800/10 = $80/year versus $800/14 = $57/year. Extrapolated across 3–4 major appliances per household: $70–$200/year in excess replacement costs from shortened lifespans.
For households with smart appliances that have been bricked by discontinued cloud services or subscription requirements — a growing category — the costs are higher and immediate.
Component 5: Software and Cloud Service Discontinuation — ~$60–$300/year
Google has discontinued 295 products since 2006. Amazon has shut down numerous Echo features and entire product lines. Logitech killed the Harmony Hub ecosystem. Belkin discontinued WeMo. Revolv's entire smart home platform was shut down with 30 days notice, rendering hundreds of dollars of hardware instantly useless.
Quantifying this is difficult because it's event-driven rather than recurring. But if we assume the average American household experiences one significant hardware-killing service discontinuation every 4–5 years — a conservative estimate for households with above-average smart device density — and the average affected product cost $150–$400, the annualized cost is $30–$100/year.
For households that invested heavily in discontinued ecosystems — Nest Secure, Wink, Insteon, SmartThings V1 — the costs in a single year can run $500–$2,000 in suddenly-useless hardware. The annualized average across all households is lower, but the variance is extreme.
Add the cost of software subscriptions that were acquired as "lifetime licenses" and subsequently converted to recurring billing — Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office perpetual licenses that are no longer offered, various productivity tools — and the total rises to $60–$300/year.
Component 6: Shrinkflation and Material Downgrade in Consumables — ~$100–$300/year
This component covers the products that didn't raise their prices — they just gave you less. The 16-oz package that became 14.5 oz. The chocolate bar that got thinner. The paper towel that added a "half-sheet" perforation to effectively halve the standard sheet size.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI methodology attempts to adjust for unit size changes, but researchers have documented consistent gaps between measured inflation and actual cost-per-unit increases in consumer packaged goods. The Consumer Price Index Shrinkflation Adjustment Study (2023) estimated that untracked shrinkflation cost the average American household approximately $200–$400/year in effective purchasing power loss above the official inflation figure.
We use a more conservative figure — $100–$300/year — to account for the fact that some shrinkflation is eventually captured in CPI revisions and that not all package size reductions represent enshittification versus genuine cost pass-through.
The Total
| Category | Annual Cost Range |
|---|---|
| Shortened smartphone lifespans | $80–$220 |
| Subscription creep on existing hardware | $240–$600 |
| Printer ink lock-in | $80–$200 |
| Appliance repairability failure | $70–$200 |
| Software/cloud discontinuation | $60–$300 |
| Shrinkflation and material downgrade | $100–$300 |
| Total | $630–$1,820 |
Our $1,200–$2,800 headline figure uses a slightly wider range that accounts for households with higher device density, recent appliance replacement cycles, or significant smart home investment. The lower end of the range — $630 — reflects a household with minimal smart devices, no recent appliance failures, and a printer they don't use much. The upper end reflects the household that has been fully enrolled in the modern connected device ecosystem for a decade.
None of this includes the time cost: the hours spent troubleshooting firmware-bricked devices, researching workarounds for features that disappeared in an update, or navigating the subscription cancellation dark patterns that the FTC has now specifically moved to regulate. If you value your time at $25/hour and spend five hours per year on enshittification-adjacent problems — a conservative estimate — add another $125.
What the Alternatives Would Cost
If every American household made purchasing decisions based purely on product integrity — bought the most repairable smartphone, the most durable appliance, the printer without proprietary cartridges, the smart home devices with local processing — how much would they save?
The honest answer is: not as much as you'd hope in year one, and significantly more in year three and beyond. The upfront cost of high-integrity products is often higher. A Framework laptop costs more than a comparably-specced Dell. A Speed Queen washer costs more than a Samsung smart washer. A Synology NAS costs more than a Ring subscription upfront.
But the math changes radically over time. A product you keep for ten years instead of three has an effective annual cost that is dramatically lower. A printer that accepts any cartridge costs 80% less to operate per year. An appliance you can repair yourself for $30 in parts avoids a $600 replacement cost.
Purchasing for integrity is a form of arbitrage: pay more at the front end, pay much less over the full ownership horizon. The enshittification economy is designed to obscure this math — to make the upfront price comparison easy and the total cost of ownership invisible.
URDB exists to make the math visible.
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