What It CostsAbout
What It Costs is a small independent site that answers one question about thirty-one different machines: how much does this add to the electricity bill? Not roughly, not on average, and not in somebody else’s currency — with the wattage of your appliance and the price on your own bill.
Why it exists
Search for what a tumble dryer costs to run and you get three kinds of page. Energy suppliers and comparison sites publish a blog post with one number, for one country, calculated at a price that was accurate the month it was written and exists mainly to sell you a tariff. General calculator sites have the arithmetic but no appliance presets, no currencies and no idea whether your machine is measured per hour or per cycle. And forums, where people work it out for each other.
None of them gives you a tool for your machine at your price. That is the whole gap.
The one rule this site follows
We never tell you what electricity costs. The price per kWh is always a field you can type in, because that number is different for every household, every tariff and every time of day, and any figure we published would be stale within months. Picking a country pre-fills an approximate average so the form is not empty — nothing on this site depends on it being right, and the moment you type your own, it is gone.
Appliance wattages are the opposite: a 1,500 W heater is a standard and a tumble dryer’s kWh per cycle changes over years, not months. Those we do publish, always with the usual range beside them, and always from a citable source.
Where the numbers come from
Typical wattages and per-cycle figures follow published US Department of Energy and ENERGY STAR data. Electricity price references come from the US Energy Information Administration and Eurostat. Charging losses for electric cars follow the documented range for AC home charging. Every tool lists its own sources under How we calculate, and the shared formulas are set out in full on the methodology page.
What this is not
It is not a tariff comparison service, and there is nothing to sign up to in order to see a number. It cannot tell you what your bill will be — only what one appliance contributes to it, which is usually the question people are actually asking.
Nothing you type is sent anywhere. Every calculation happens in your own browser, no account is needed for any tool, and the site holds no record of what you worked out.
Spotted a wattage that looks wrong, or a machine we are missing? Tell us — corrections and requests both get read.