The app for people who count
How many hours of your life does that actually cost?
Price tags lie in dollars. The real invoice is hours you already traded for money. Enter your pay and the thing you want. Hourcost tells you the shift you'd work to own it.
Your pay
Take-home is what's left after tax. 70–75% is a decent US starting point if you don't want to do the paperwork.
The purchase
Compare
Two wants. One pair of hours.
Same salary, two checkout pages. See which one steals more of your week.
Take-home $27.00 / hour, using the hours and tax rate from the calculator.
Option A
4.4 hrs
Option B
16 hrs
A costs less time
Difference: 11 hrs — 1.4 workdays.
The idea
Money is a unit conversion problem.
On September 8, 2026, a post on X sold this as a “$100K app idea” with a joke attached: the app for cheap people. The pitch was one line. Your salary plus a purchase. How many hours of work does it actually cost.
That joke is doing real work. A $249 pair of headphones is abstract. Six hours and twenty minutes of the life you already sold to an employer is not. Once you see the hours, impulse shopping has to argue with a calendar instead of a vibe.
Hourcost uses take-home pay, not sticker salary, because tax is part of the trade. It uses the hours you actually work in a year, not a fantasy 2,080. The verdict is blunt on purpose. If the copy stings, the purchase probably should too.
Nothing here is financial advice. It is a unit converter with opinions. Your money, your hours, your call.