Payment Plan and 0% Finance True Cost

A $1,000 item on 0% finance over twelve months. Paying cash today would have cost $920. That plan is about 17% a year.

Nothing dishonest has happened and no interest has been charged. The cost is the discount you gave up by not paying today, and nobody writes that down anywhere — it is not on the agreement, because as far as the agreement is concerned there is nothing to declare.

This page finds it. Put in the list price, whatever you could have knocked off for paying cash, and the payments. It works out what the plan costs over paying today, and the annual rate that represents on the money you did not hand over.

The table shows the same plan at every size of cash discount, from none to fifteen per cent, so the connection between the two is something you can see rather than something you have to accept.

It also says plainly when an offer really is free. If there is no cash discount to give up, there is nothing to pay for the time, and the page says so and tells you what is left to think about instead — what the agreement does if you miss a payment, and whether committing the money for a year is a problem in itself. A tool that found a villain in every offer would be no more use than one that never did.

The rate is the one implied by the numbers you type. It is not a regulated APR, it is not a quotation, and it does not include fees or charges. And it does not know whether the money is better used elsewhere for those months, which is the real question behind most of these decisions and is not an arithmetic one.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Two ways of paying for the same thing, side by side.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.