Keep Above
Own it or hire it
A trailer, a carpet cleaner, a party marquee — some things you can buy once, or hire every time. This calculator counts both ways over the same years and the same uses a year: owning's price, upkeep and eventual sale against hiring's per-use fee and extras. Each lands on a cost per year and per use, with the break-even stated as a fact and no winner declared.
Not counted while this is $0
After 5 years
Delivery, membership, deposits — not counted while $0
Put in what buying one would cost, and what one hire would cost. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| Owning | Hiring | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid up front | — | — |
| Value lost | — | — |
| Hire fees | — | — |
| Other costs | — | — |
| Total over 5 years | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a use | — | — |
What does owning cost while the thing is sitting idle?
The two prices are the easy half of this; what separates one item from another is what owning takes in the months nothing happens. Somewhere to keep it, registration or insurance it carries whether or not it moves, and the seals, fuel and batteries that age on a shelf all belong to owning alone. Hiring has no idle cost, which is why the upkeep box carries more of this comparison than its size on the page suggests.
The uses-a-year field also hides two very different shapes: some things are used in a burst, several times across one weekend and then not again, and others once or twice a year for years on end. Both can average to the same number a year, but the second spreads the storing and the ageing over a far longer stretch, so the years field is doing as much work here as the uses one.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
Owning and hiring separate over years rather than weeks, so the useful question is what a balance would look like that far out — which budgeting apps forecast your balance, and how far ahead.
About this calculator
How is each way counted?
Owning totals the price plus upkeep over the years, minus what it would sell for at the end. Hiring totals the per-use fee times your uses a year times the years, plus any yearly extras. Both cover the same years and the same uses, so the per-year and per-use figures compare directly.
What is the crossing point?
The uses a year at which owning's total and hiring's total would land on the same figure, over the years you set. It is a position in the arithmetic and names no side. Where one side's structure rules a match out — owning nets to nothing, or hiring's yearly extras alone already pass owning's total — the page says which of those happened instead of printing a number.
Does a hire that runs for a week count as one use?
A use here is one hire, however long it lasts. The per-use fee is whatever a single occasion costs from collection to return, so a week out at a weekly rate is one use at that rate rather than seven. Counting the days separately would multiply a fee that was only charged once.