About NonCable
NonCable is a small, independent, ad-supported site built around six free calculators for people cutting the cord, plus guides and a streaming-history museum. There’s no origin story here — just a walk through what the tools do and how each one gets its numbers.
Working out what you’re actually spending
Two tools exist because streaming bills are easy to lose track of. The Streaming Cost Calculator adds up what you enter for each service you subscribe to and totals it by month and by year — a plain sum, nothing more. The Subscription Cost Per Hour Calculator divides a service’s monthly price by the hours you tell it you actually watched, so a $15 service you use ten hours a month and a $15 service you use two hours a month stop looking identical. Both are arithmetic on the figures you supply; neither knows your real bill unless you enter it correctly.
Cable versus streaming, and bundles versus buying separately
The Cable vs Streaming Savings Calculator takes the cable bill you enter and the streaming total you enter and shows the difference, monthly and annualized. It only ever compares the two numbers you type in — it doesn’t look up your cable provider’s current rates for you. The Bundle Savings Calculator does the same kind of comparison for a different question: is a bundle price actually cheaper than paying for each service on its own, or is it just marketed that way. Both tools are neutral about the answer; sometimes cable wins, sometimes the bundle doesn’t save anything, and the calculator will say so either way.
Data caps and internet speed
The other two tools deal with the technical side of streaming rather than the price side. The Streaming Data Usage Calculator takes your viewing hours and the resolution you watch at and estimates the gigabytes that adds up to in a month, using widely published per-hour data rates for SD, HD, and 4K — useful if your ISP has a data cap and you want to know how close you are to it. The Streaming Bandwidth Calculator goes the other direction: tell it how many streams run at once in your household and at what quality, and it estimates the internet speed you’d need so playback doesn’t stall. Both are estimates built on general published bitrate figures, not a measurement of your actual connection or your ISP’s actual network.
Beyond the calculators
The blog and guidescover the same ground in longer form — live-TV streaming, antennas, and how the pieces of a cord-cutting setup fit together. Separately, The Streaming Museum is a browsable timeline of the services, devices, and broadcast technology that led to how people watch TV today; every entry there is drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and it exists for browsing, not for calculating anything.
What this is and isn’t
NonCable is independent and supported by on-page advertising. It isn’t affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, any cable company, or any other service named in a comparison or guide here. Every calculator works only from the numbers you type in and general published figures — it can not see your actual bill, your actual internet connection, or your provider’s current pricing, so treat results as estimates for planning, not a guarantee of what you’ll pay or get. Prices, channel line-ups, and plans change; check the provider’s own site before you subscribe or cancel anything. Questions about a specific result are welcome at the contact page.