Considering wanikani forces you to keep a study schedule and you can’t make progress faster than what you are allowed to unlock, what is the minimum you need to spend (month to month sub) in order to complete all the kanji?
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I think the least amount of time you need is around a year
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It’s always good to remember that Japanese children spend a lot of their school years learning kanji. So, merely putting a bit over 1 year into learning 2000 kanji is super fast! 
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Yeah! I think Japanese children take nine (9) years to complete the Joyo kanji.
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It took me 69 years to complete the nice kanji
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I did 10 lessons a day during the weekday, 20 a day on the weekends and it took me about 2.5 years to get to 60.
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Technically that’s just to get to level 60. Add another 6-8 months to burn everything or forever if you want to keep up with the content updates. 
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“Complete” the kanji? As in unlock and do the lessons: as mentioned minimum 12 months (so a year’s sub is more cost effective than month by month). To burn all the kanji, you’ll need at least 17 months. This is assuming the following:
- you make very few mistakes, especially in the apprentice stages (first 4 reviews of items) and, if going for a 17 month burn, you can’t make any mistakes in the last 6 months (I’m assuming we’re talking theoretical here)
- you arrange your sleep schedule around WK reviews, which means regularly waking up at 2AM or 4AM to do a bunch of reviews and occasionally leveling up at that time and doing 30+ lessons on top of that.
- you review at least 3 times a day and are prepared to face 400+ reviews on a daily basis, ergo you are available to spend 2+ hours a day on WK distributed across the day.
I could advise not to plan for such a thing, but you asked for the minimum time, and there it is.
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So realistically if you intended to burn everything the lifetime option is actually the best value for practical study times…
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Lifetime is the way to go. “Life” tends to get in the way of studying, so many people have large breaks in their studies, or just find they need a slower pace.
On the plus side, there is usually a sale on lifetime memberships in mid December, so by the time you are finishing level 3, you should be ready to buy at a discount.
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Considering your question, it seems that ur on a hurry or just want to get it as cheap as possible. U can also use anki cards to learn kanji for free without unlock limitation if thats the matter.
But u wont have a nice profile picture on anki.
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I think, if you’re paying each month, it will probably be about $108 in total, or ~£80. That’s how much it’ll cost if you finish it as quickly as possible, I believe, while paying monthly
Problem is i already know a fair bit of kanji meaning i have to not only WAIT a long time to be able to get to stuff i don’t know but I also have to pay for time I’m not actively learning.
Really depends how much is “a fair bit”. I knew about 300 kanjis when starting WK, so the first month or so was only review, then I started seeing new kanji more and more, and around 2 months in everything was new. Overall just a blip in the radar compared to how long it takes to learn Japanese.
But on the other hand, here is a review of someone who did WK after passing the N1. Of course, they had to wait much more to find kanji or vocab they didn’t know
In any case I would wait to finish the 3 first free levels before making any kind of decision. For some people WK clicks well and for some it doesn’t.
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Surely both of you are just saying this to sound encouraging and realize its actually a horrible comparison, right?
over 99% of people here will never get to the language level and ability to use those kanji that a native will have after 9 years of schooling in their entire lifetime. A native learning a kanji cant even be compared to doing the lesson for a kanji on wanikani.
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Well, when I started out I also new quite a bit of kanji readings from immersion learning over several years. I still felt it was very helpful to revise both the kanji I actually knew and those that I new partially. But if you’re in a particular hurry, there are other apps to learn kanji with, like anki for example, as @TsukimiYoru mentioned. 
As for economics on WK, it’s defo best to go for yearly subscription and add a couple of months if you’re close to the end of that period.
But, as for doing things in less than a year, you’re going to feel like a stuffed turkey at the end of a year.
Even if you have some knowledge to fall back on, if you go full-speed on WK, it’s going to accumulate a huge pile of reviews for you to complete each day and it’s going to consume a lot of your time, time that you could put into learning grammar, doing immersion etc. It becomes mentally draining after a while. Especially if you don’t have much time to use your Japanese, because WK it taking up so much of your time at the point.
It’s better to have a more sensible pace and allow what you learn to settle down a bit, and to give yourself time to enjoy it by reading, watching anime, listening to podcasts etc. 
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You’re probably already too late to beat this, but…
Edit: Darn you forums suggesting old topics
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