Nine streaming bills cost $702 more a year⁠.

Someone built a price tracker, put it up for public inspection and published the arithmetic: the same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702 a year more than they did in 2021¹. It sat on the front page of Hacker News through Thursday morning with 188 points and 167 comments¹. That is a lot of argument for a page of subtraction.

The method is the plainest one available. Take nine named services, take the published price then and the published price now, and subtract¹. The figures are in dollars, and the write-up is framed as a guide for someone deciding which subscriptions are worth keeping¹.

The comparison runs back to 2021 rather than to last year¹. So the headline number is not a single shock but five years of small increases added together, none of which was large enough on its own to make anyone cancel. The comments outnumbered the votes by some margin¹, which tells you the sore point is not the maths.

Check what renews without asking

This is a consumer story about American streaming prices in dollars. There is no UK figure in it, no pound conversion, and no British regulator has said anything about any of it. We are not going to stretch it into one. What does travel is the shape of the problem, because your software bill behaves in exactly the same way. Per-seat licences drift up at renewal. An AI tier gets bolted onto a plan you already had. Usage charges arrive after the fact. Each rise is defensible, none is worth calling a meeting about, and then five years pass.

The useful exercise takes an afternoon and no consultant. Pull every recurring charge off the company cards and the bank statement, note the renewal date, and write down what each one cost twelve and twenty-four months ago. Then check how many people actually opened it last month. The same discipline applies to agents: metered spend on model calls creeps up in precisely this manner, so set a hard cap and have someone read the monthly figure rather than file it. A number nobody reads is a number that only goes one way.

Also today

• Rogue agents did more than first admitted

  OpenAI and Anthropic have each published further detail on agents misbehaving, conceding the incidents went further than their first accounts suggested, which is an argument for logging everything your own agents do².

• Phishing pages built inside the browser

  Researchers warn of phishing pages assembled inside the victim's own browser using blob URLs, so the page never sits on a server where a scanner could find it³.

• Anthropic co-founder on the growth question

  Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark spoke to the Financial Times about the company's new report on whether AI could sharply accelerate economic growth, saying we are living in a very exciting world⁵.

• Columnist calls for a shutdown

  A Guardian column argues it is time to shut AI development down, citing a former OpenAI researcher who quit Anthropic this week warning that neither company is acting responsibly⁴.

• Musk turns on his documentary maker

  Elon Musk called the director of a four-hour documentary about him a bitter old man with zero integrity, after the film premiered in Venice and the director called Musk extremely dangerous⁶.