Sticker
Shock
Same order. Same place.Only the price changed.
The Damage Index · 2019 → 2026
The Streaming Ratchet
The one category that can't be measured from 2019 — four of these didn't exist yet.
So this section starts each service at its own launch price.
a year that tier's price went up · where inflation alone would have put it
Build your stack
Tap the ones you pay for.
About these numbers: Prices are the U.S. monthly rate for each service's standard ad-free tier, from launch to today. Launch years differ, so the percentages are not comparable to the 2019–2026 figures elsewhere on this site — a service that launched in 2021 has had less time to climb. The year chips mark calendar years with a price increase for that tier. Hulu's figure tracks the ad-free "No Ads" plan introduced in 2015, not the 2010 Hulu Plus launch. Netflix's 2010 baseline is the original streaming-only plan. Ad-supported tiers, bundles, and promotional rates are excluded throughout.
Meanwhile, your buying power
Still buys what it used to: $77.50 Faded to inflation: $22.50
To be clear: the bill didn't change — prices did. $100 today buys what about $77.50 bought in 2019. That's not the dollar collapsing; it's every price on this site compounding at once, measured from your wallet's side of the register.
The bigger picture
The dashed line in the index above is CPI — the Consumer Price Index, the government's official inflation measure, published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from a huge basket of goods and services. From 2019 to 2026 it rose about +29%, so anything above that line got more expensive faster than the economy overall; anything below it held its ground, relatively speaking.
One catch worth knowing: CPI is an average of everything, so it can feel wrong on purpose. If eggs double but televisions get cheaper, CPI splits the difference — even though nobody eats a television. That gap between the official average and what you actually buy every week is exactly what this site exists to show.
Most people under 60 had never shopped through real inflation before this. From the early 1990s to 2020, prices crept up so slowly that nobody kept receipts to prove anything. Then 2021–2023 delivered the sharpest run-up in four decades, and suddenly everyone became an amateur economist at the checkout counter. That's why a website full of old receipts hits differently now than it would have at any point in the last forty years.
Why this exists
StickerShock started with a bacon cheeseburger. One too many trips to Five Guys ended with me staring at the register total in disbelief, so I started digging up old receipts to figure out whether it was me or the prices. It was the prices.
This site is for educational purposes — a plain, side-by-side record of what everyday things cost then versus now. No agenda, no ads, no telling you what to think. Just receipts.
Got an old receipt?
Every comparison on this site starts with a real receipt. Dig through your email confirmations and shoeboxes — DM a photo with the year, price, and city, and it might join the index.
X Money is in-app only — open X, tap Money → Send Money → search .