9 ms·

The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021

386 points by honestlyranked 24d ago

mdavid626 24d ago
Pirating it is.
honestlyranked 24d ago
I got annoyed that "the price" of a subscription is really two prices — the one advertised and the one you end up paying — and that nobody keeps the receipts. So I built a tracker that checks 27 providers' public pricing pages daily, and separately curated dated, sourced price histories for streaming services going back to 2010. The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers: March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions. Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August. Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse. One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one. Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month. The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them. Data is CC BY 4.0: https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv Method: https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/ https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/ Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking. Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.
- walrus01 24d ago
  Did you write this, or did Claude?
  - baggachipz 24d ago
    Emdashes.
- codingdave 24d ago
  This was clearly a popular post, but please do be aware that blog posts are explicitly not "Show HNs".
honestlyranked 24d ago
[dead]
throwaway_ab 24d ago
Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!
- hypfer 24d ago
  Likely dead due to obvious LLM writing. I would suspect that the (auto)moderation is working as intended there.
  - not-so-darkstar 24d ago
    >Likely dead due to obvious LLM writing I think it's the look of the page: dark background and bright colours with an halo.
ivanjermakov 24d ago
$702 more is relative and tells nothing without the basis. It's 61% increase in 5 years.
- deleted 24d ago
  [deleted]
- iso1631 24d ago
  So in real terms it's up 26%. Which of course is to be expected, people have a set amount they are willing to spend on entertainment, in the past it was cable -- in 2015 the average US cable TV subscription was about $100, that's about $140 today in real terms, or $1700 a year. Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
  - MYEUHD 24d ago
    How did you come up with the 26% number?
    - pbmonster 24d ago
      Total consumer-price inflation has been about 27.7% since 2021. Inflation is multiplicative, so: 1.277 * 1.26 = 1.61 giving us the 61% subscriptions went up.
      - rcxdude 24d ago
        Though it's a little circular, because this is the kinda of thing that goes into the inflation calculation.
  - OtherShrezzing 24d ago
    That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no? I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions. I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
mbeavitt 24d ago
Bring back DVD rentals! In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
- footy 24d ago
  I don't know about in the US, but I live in a fairly small city in Canada and we have DVD rentals. I go to the video store almost every week, and it was on the papers that a second one (which will also rent out VHS!) is opening. The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months. It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
- 0xEF 24d ago
  Eh, I miss video rental stores in the US, but I don't agree that they would solve this problem. I worked for a large chain of them as a teen, and know first-hand that people were spending just as much on rentals as they do with subscription services, especially when you add in game rentals and late fees. More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
- musha68k 24d ago
  *UHD BluRay rentals but yes, hard agree. Also a great place to socialize and talk about which movie to rent traditionally.
koe123 24d ago
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
acd 24d ago
What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
- swingboy 24d ago
  Piracy is one.
  - whstl 24d ago
    If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.
    - anonym29 24d ago
      Often the same people behind both! Fun fact: pirates are more likely than the average person to purchase media. https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/internet-and-on-demand-research/online-copyright-infringement/copyright-infringement-tracker https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/another-day-another-study-that-says-pirates-are-best-customers-this-time-hadopi.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anoth...
    - 0xEF 24d ago
      I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD. I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state. *we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
      - 24d ago
not-so-darkstar 24d ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 23d ago
  We've banned this account.
  - not-so-darkstar 22d ago
    [dead]
tjpnz 24d ago
I'm mostly down to one. It's called Daddyflix (Jellyfin, actually) and runs on a Mac Mini in my home office. Costs close to zero, is accessible everywhere and there's no ads or other bullshit.
- BrissyCoder 24d ago
  Yeah same. I have an agent running on it, so whenever one of my kids asks to watch something that their friends have told them about it, provided it's not retarded, I tell the agent to go find it and it shows up on the kids TV. No monthly bullshit (apart from the AI supscription I pay for anyway). Automated piracy. I love it.
  - SwamyM 24d ago
    Is this different than what Radarr and similar tools do?
  - voganmother42 24d ago
    Using the word “retarded” in 2026, you sound smart
    - machomaster 24d ago
      To try to tone police in 2026, you sound insufferable.
  - bethekind 19d ago
    Curious do you have this setup or a howto anywhere?
- asimovDev 24d ago
  is it an old intel mac mini or ARM?
  - tjpnz 24d ago
    M4 Pro but there are still builds for Intel based macs.
boxed 24d ago
Money comparisons that aren't inflation adjusted aren't "honest". They are in fact DIShonest.
- immibis2 24d ago
  How do you even measure inflation accurately, given the current government, and has there been 61% inflation over the last 5 years?
  - boxed 24d ago
    Economists exists, we have data on this. Don't be silly.
    - immibis2 24d ago
      Is https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts economists?
- vehemenz 24d ago
  Which metric of inflation are you adjusting it to? And which assumptions are built into the goods and services measured, as well as their respective weights, of that index?
  - boxed 24d ago
    That's a false dichotomy. An imperfectly measured inflation adjustment IS STILL VASTLY SUPERIOR to a non-adjusted number. By an enormous amount.
    - vehemenz 23d ago
      Sure. Which one? If it’s CPI just say CPI.
OroPla 24d ago
I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it. It is way cheaper long term.
- sdcfgy 24d ago
  Yeah that. I am mostly running on FLAC rips I did myself.
- posh_somme 24d ago
  Streaming services do not offer you what you like forever, they offer you what you didn't know about for the amount of time you need to watch it. So these are two different things
  - bigblind 24d ago
    Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.
- heaney-555 24d ago
  >It is way cheaper long term. How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
  - fdgfikgfv 24d ago
    There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)
    - rgavuliak 24d ago
      I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.
TazeTSchnitzel 24d ago
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.
- polarbearballs 24d ago
  You could be presenting the most carefully-researched text in the world, but with such obviously machine made paper I'm not going to attempt to read it.
  - matja 24d ago
    You're rejecting information solely based on the aesthetic quality of the delivery medium?
    - walrus01 24d ago
      Even if the information is accurate, I'm calling it low effort slop... Smart LLMs have basically automated producing a plausible looking "content farm".
- Brendinooo 24d ago
  This is such a weird take. Did you gatekeep people who built sites with FrontPage as well?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 24d ago
    FrontPage didn't generate your content for you! So there was no reason to assume a FrontPage page might be meaningless just from how it looked. For AI-generated sites, though, if the page looks like slop, is it worth bothering to figure out if it actually is slop? It's not like they're uncorrelated variables. Sure, occasionally it won't be. But I'm drowning here. I must simply assume that if someone is serious about conveying a message, they won't package it in this form. I don't think it's even gatekeeping. You could copy-paste two tables and write two sentences into a Word document and export to HTML, one of the laziest possible ways to produce a website, and it'd still be less off-putting because it doesn't have the association with slop content.
nottorp 24d ago
Ok a price increase but: "nine streaming subscriptions". No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
- bnastic 24d ago
  Apple Music, Netflix, Disney+, BBC. That's four. I don't want any of them. Three I have to take due to kids' nagging, the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
  - jaffa2 24d ago
    Tell your kids ‘no’ Bring some sanity back to the world.
  - mystifyingpoi 24d ago
    Easy, just make kids pay for these, if they need them this much.
  - eptcyka 24d ago
    I never paid for the licence for I never used iPlayer and the investigators were welcomed into my house to take a look at the chromecast dongle.
  - jbs789 24d ago
    The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk. I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use. But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british. I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked. Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.
    - nottorp 24d ago
      The "licensing" has a point because it does make the BBC more impartial since the current government cannot adjust their funding down or up depending on their programming. However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
sdcfgy 24d ago
This is why I steal all my shit.
- vehemenz 24d ago
  Hear, hear.
LightBug1 24d ago
... which is why I opted out of all of that bullshit from the start. Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.
ahmedfromtunis 24d ago
Any price comparison over time should include inflation. Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference. Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.
- deleted 24d ago
  [deleted]
- bko 24d ago
  I think the point is that inflation numbers are bs. The official number from 2021 to today is 23%. But we didn't see prices only 23%. A restaurant mean didn't go from $20 to $25. It easily went up 50% or more. Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
  - consensus1 24d ago
    I assume you got that > 50% number from actual CPI data and not just vibes, right?
    - bko 23d ago
      When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's literally trillions at stake for under-reporting these numbers. A lot of government benefits are tied to this not to mention political ramifications of high inflation. So I'll go with vibes (i.e. experienced reality) over some government re-balanced basket formula
- astura 24d ago
  Agreed, $95.91 a month in 2021-03 is $120.91 in July 2026 dollars. The current cost is $154.41, so it grew $33.50 a month after accounting for inflation. I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months. Tubi has better content than Disney+.
crumby 24d ago
Yup
stego-tech 24d ago
Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse). To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points. From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
ericpauley 24d ago
AI;dr
crims0n 24d ago
Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red. Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
- consensus1 24d ago
  Is that important context? I would say it's not. What if those companies already made massive profits and said "I think people are willing to pay more for this, so I'm going to raise the price." And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've raised the price of my services many times in my career for exactly the same reason.
- Forgeties79 24d ago
  They are the ones who set the market so that’s on them. They are the ones who set what people were willing to tolerate. If it’s not sustainable, then it’s not a good business. They aren’t entitled to existing. Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt: Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience. Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
delegate 24d ago
BitTorrent: 0% increase. Just saying.
- nekusar 24d ago
  And Jellyfin for the server. And whatever leftover storage you have. And PIA or Proton for a port forwardable VPN. And https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video for that real Blockbuster experience.
- ozgung 24d ago
  In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
- Tepix 24d ago
  You need to rent a VPS (for $$$) to avoid litigation however. The those VPS have increased in price also.
  - walrus01 24d ago
    Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar. The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
walrus01 24d ago
From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026. 98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar. Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. " I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
- jbs789 24d ago
  Yeah it was interesting to me that I identified it immediately. Perhaps been spending too much time w/ Claude It's capable of many different designs but this site tells me Rashid didn't even bother.
  - walrus01 24d ago
    New proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...
    - zrail 24d ago
      I haven't tried it personally but my understanding from friends is that Pangram is very accurate, at least for now. https://www.pangram.com/ https://www.pangram.com/
      - walrus01 24d ago
        As a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium. Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
axegon_ 24d ago
Hence the reason I ditched all of this. 1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me. 2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't). With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
- tyingq 24d ago
  They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also. I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
  - axegon_ 24d ago
    I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons: 1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2 2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything. 3. Price. 4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library. Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
Lerc 24d ago
>At 2021-03 prices these four cost $1,150.92 a year. Today the same nine cost $1,852.92 Is that number really correct? It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to $1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56) It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.
- boonzeet 24d ago
  Forgive me but where does 1.10^5 come into the equation? What is the significance of this number? Both figures can be arrived to by taking the monthly total and multiplying it by 12.
  - Lerc 24d ago
    1.1^5 is a 10 percent increase compounded 5 times.
abejora 24d ago
We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used: * They increased the cost of all price tiers. * They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more. * And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing. This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore. You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
- ivanbakel 24d ago
  To play devil's advocate a bit: running software isn't free. If you're paying for an online service, the hosting cost to the company does scale per-seat. It's easy to say that the company only paid the cost of development once (and even then, more users = more development demand), but you're not a user of a single unit of developed software. For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
  - Forgeties79 24d ago
    That may be the case but they are getting so aggressive that I am constantly having to reconfirm devices within my own home. Luckily I just run my own server now but we have HBO for free with my cell plan so that’s the ones subscription we still have. I have to do email 2FA probably every 4th or 5th time we open it because it’s on “too many devices.”
Brendinooo 24d ago
Still a great ecosystem and value for dollar overall! That's one reason why prices have gone up. No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services. Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
- library8848 24d ago
  They will own nothing and be happy Are you a netflix exec by any chance?
  - upsuper 24d ago
    I, for one, don't see any problem here. If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy. Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
  - Brendinooo 24d ago
    Nope, not a Netflix exec. One would imagine if I was, I'd have used Netflix as my example. I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.) I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem. And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month. Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.
monomial 24d ago
I find that piracy is the only sane option any more
- grandwizardmarv 24d ago
  spot on
- pepitodelospalo 24d ago
  I pay for Prime and still prefer to torrent Amazon shows. The experience is just better.
  - timpera 24d ago
    Prime's app is ridiculously bad imo. I'm not sure why that is, but everything is slower and takes more clicks and digging than similar apps on the same device. There are also significantly more ads than on Disney+ or Netflix ad tiers. I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.
  - nosioptar 24d ago
    I was in the same boat with Netflix.
- tripleee 24d ago
  My wife had a free trial of Apple TV and we found we still preferred to use Jellyfin because it was a better experience
  - footy 24d ago
    I haven't actually paid for Apple TV in some time but I remember thinking it had the worst interface of any streamer I've tried. Impossible to know which show card you had selected.
mococa 24d ago
Besides youtube premium (because kid) and apple one (because icloud) I have no more subscriptions. I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog. Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.
mulhoon 24d ago
Do you think in the future, maybe in 5 to 10 years, that the vibe coded aesthetic will come back as a design trend?
- walrus01 24d ago
  Welcome to 1997! https://cololocation.com/ https://cololocation.com/
- newsy-combi 24d ago
  15 years. The AI itself will be nostalgic for it.
BadBadJellyBean 24d ago
I like occasionally watching movies. I will rarely watch a movie twice. Streaming would be the best option for me, but I will not subscribe to more than one service. Get your shit together. Do cross licensing. Split production from distribution. Until then I will not be paying for any streaming service.
- lotsofpulp 24d ago
  Why would streaming be the best option for you to watch a movie once? You have long been able to rent movies with just a few clicks from many sellers. Maybe Netflix is the only one where you have to subscribe for a month to watch a movie.
  - no-name-here 24d ago
    I picked a random film, Titanic, and supposedly it's $4 to rent on Amazon or Apple TV. A Netflix account costs $9 with ads or $20 without, so I guess it depends on whether you watch more or fewer films than that per month?
    - nosioptar 24d ago
      JFC, it didn't even cost $4 to rent titanic when it was new.
musha68k 24d ago
Mostly mediocre to bad entertainment and distractions anyways. I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.
- emsign 24d ago
  I buy CDs, DVDs and BluRays second hand. You can get pretty good deals because there's still people who sell their entire collection because "everything is available through streaming now!". I just hope there will be much more people who sell their old stuff in order to pay for those rising subscriptions prices.
pprotas 24d ago
Oh no! Anyways Claude set up an *arr stack, a torrent client and Jellyfin.
newsclues 24d ago
Jellyfin is free. Although more SSDs and HDDs are more expensive than in 2021.
deleted 24d ago
[deleted]
ViktorRay 24d ago
Why have the streaming costs increased so much? Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either. Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too? Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.
- baggachipz 24d ago
  Subsidized prices at launch to lure in customers. Then profit-seeking, by raising prices and offering less for the money. Textbook enshittification.
grandwizardmarv 24d ago
I cancelled majority of my services for this exact reason. I was a member of netflix since 2015, when I checked my credit card bill last month and saw the charge I really had to question if it was even worth it at this point.
rappatic 24d ago
I wish you’d at least take the effort to de-LLMify the vibecoded site and copy text
sneak 24d ago
Inflation over the last five years accounts for the first 25% of that 61% price increase. This means it’s only about +36% and not +61% as claimed. Huge difference.
written-beyond 24d ago
Absolute garbage article and garbage website. This content shouldn't be allowed on HN.
ticulatedspline 24d ago
meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration. You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
zeroonetwothree 24d ago
Streaming is basically a sounding error in my budget. Now if we’re talking about food or health care…
apercu 24d ago
More expensive and worse in most ways. Just like most things in the current stage of oligopolies.
randusername 24d ago
Price increases are tolerated if the value increases. Even rent-seeking is tolerated if the value is relatively stable. But what we have here is value proposition decreasing from fragmentation and shallow content and increasingly intrusive targeted ads while the prices keep going up. We traded one annoying cable company for dozens.
- georgeecollins 24d ago
  Yes the price keeps going up, but every purchase is 100% optional. Please explain to me the reason why anyone needs any of these. What kind of person has all of these subscriptions? If you have YouTube TV and Spotify that is $22.
rythmshifter 24d ago
If buying ain’t owning, pirating ain’t stealing
- amelius 24d ago
  If buying ain't owning, then selling is stealing
robk3 24d ago
inflation inflating
psim1 24d ago
One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.
- BeetleB 24d ago
  I've gotten it many years, but rarely watched it, because my login keeps "expiring" on Roku. If I don't watch it for, say, a month, I'll need to log in again. It's terribly inconvenient. Hope they fix(ed) it.
  - ravetcofx 24d ago
    Same happens with Canadian streaming services like CBC Gem and Knowledge network
  - robocat 24d ago
    Unavailable outside US/Canada. See "Is Passport available outside of the U.S.?" section of: https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096220-common-questions https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096220-... PBS is not a producer, but rather a distributor of programming. Some details that imply workarounds might be difficult (although I suggest instead better to Google for how to access): https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096659-can-i-use-a-vpn-to-access-pbs-content- https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096659-... https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000694871-i-made-a-donation-but-did-not-receive-an-email-with-an-activation-code- https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000694871-i...
    - BeetleB 24d ago
      Did you respond to the wrong comment? This is not about being outside the US or using a VPN. This is about the pain of having to repeatedly log in.
      - 24d ago
Aurornis 24d ago
Several of these services launched around 2021 with introductory pricing, which is necessary for attracting new users to a new service. Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.
- toss1 24d ago
  Corollary to that is the then-newish services had less content now. A higher price alone for the same "tier" does not necessarily mean less value. I'd want to also estimate the overall quantity and quality offered for the higher price. Obviously, quality is subjective, but for each of those services, does a e.g., 43% increase in cost come with a greater or less than 43% increase in available selection? Does it have more or less higher/lower-rated or more/less watched content? More/fewer shows that are truncated after the first one or two seasons?
tamimio 24d ago
Notice this increase didn’t reflect in significant higher salaries for the people working in these companies (not the executives) nor more hiring, quite the opposite, more lay offs. This small indicator tells really what’s going on in the economy, more profit to the corps but people still are getting poorer, same thing applies btw to other domains like groceries or other goods or even housing. It’s a wealth distribution problem, it’s not AI, not supply chain shortages, not immigrants, non of these distractions that get pushed around, since covid, these companies and the ones who pull the strings in nations, they discovered and tested something that can easily manipulate the public and make them ok with worse living conditions: fear! If you scare the public enough about a topic and play the fear mongering tactics rights, you have a golden key to control the public: covid, wars, immigrants, protect the kids, AGI, etc etc are all topic of manipulations, follow the money and the people behind them.
burlesona 24d ago
[dead]
nater5000 24d ago
The title kind of buries important details about the distribution of these costs and their changes. For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change. So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price. Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait. And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021. All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
- ArnoVW 24d ago
  I think the point is that we are no longer in the world of Netflix in 2015, where all shows are available. Even if you watch « only » 5 shows, if they are on five different services then that means 5 subscriptions. Or you spend time planning and organizing subscriptions. .. or you just download them.
- xboxnolifes 24d ago
  The title means exactly what it says and the expanded details are nearly as close to the top of the article and as clearly presented as possible. Why does every article on HN need to find some excuse to make a complaint about the title?
maxglute 24d ago
TFW Plex lifetime and plexamp for $75.
gruturo 24d ago
The raise is even worse if you look further back than 2021. Netflix was 7.99 for ages, while the "floor" in 2021 is 13.99. Against the original baseline, the new 19.99 price is not a +43% but a +150%. Most importantly 13.99 already in 2021 bought LESS than 7.99 or 8.99 bought until a while before. Thanks to the fragmentation, the catalogue was way larger before, and as of 2022 ads were introduced to further insult the customer. High seas it is.
shevy-java 24d ago
They always try to milk people. It is the same scheme: 1) offer services at comparatively high quality (or at the least not too low in quality) at a fairly cheap price, ideally flat rate 2) lateron increase it to milk the cash cows 3) profit
e12e 24d ago
Equivalent to 10% year-to-year, every year - assuming 5 years. That is somewhat steep.
adventured 24d ago
There was a ~18 month period of time where prices went up 50-100% at stores like CVS and Walgreens. The large subscription price increases are merely matching the real inflation explosion we're seeing from the debasement of the USD due to extreme budget deficits and massive over-spending. Gold also has been correctly reflecting that procession for many years now. Which is to say it's not the streaming prices, it's everything (except for maybe televisions, for now we get to keep our cheapish 50-80" TVs).
0gs 24d ago
saying "the exact same products" when the products in question are constantly expanding (and occasionally contracting) libraries of video content is definitely "a move"
miguelfrreg 23d ago
I'm launching a small SaaS this week and the only pricing promise I made to early customers is that their price never goes up Threads like this are most of the reason
aimarkdeck 23d ago
[flagged]

386 points by honestlyranked 24d ago

Pirating it is.

I got annoyed that "the price" of a subscription is really two prices — the one advertised and the one you end up paying — and that nobody keeps the receipts. So I built a tracker that checks 27 providers' public pricing pages daily, and separately curated dated, sourced price histories for streaming services going back to 2010. The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers: March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions. Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August. Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse. One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one. Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month. The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them. Data is CC BY 4.0: https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv Method: https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/ https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/ Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking. Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.

walrus01 24d ago
Did you write this, or did Claude?
- baggachipz 24d ago
  Emdashes.
codingdave 24d ago
This was clearly a popular post, but please do be aware that blog posts are explicitly not "Show HNs".

honestlyranked 24d ago

[dead]

throwaway_ab 24d ago

Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!

hypfer 24d ago
Likely dead due to obvious LLM writing. I would suspect that the (auto)moderation is working as intended there.
- not-so-darkstar 24d ago
  >Likely dead due to obvious LLM writing I think it's the look of the page: dark background and bright colours with an halo.

ivanjermakov 24d ago

$702 more is relative and tells nothing without the basis. It's 61% increase in 5 years.

deleted 24d ago
[deleted]
iso1631 24d ago
So in real terms it's up 26%. Which of course is to be expected, people have a set amount they are willing to spend on entertainment, in the past it was cable -- in 2015 the average US cable TV subscription was about $100, that's about $140 today in real terms, or $1700 a year. Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
- MYEUHD 24d ago
  How did you come up with the 26% number?
  - pbmonster 24d ago
    Total consumer-price inflation has been about 27.7% since 2021. Inflation is multiplicative, so: 1.277 * 1.26 = 1.61 giving us the 61% subscriptions went up.
    - rcxdude 24d ago
      Though it's a little circular, because this is the kinda of thing that goes into the inflation calculation.
- OtherShrezzing 24d ago
  That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no? I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions. I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.

mbeavitt 24d ago

Bring back DVD rentals! In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).

footy 24d ago
I don't know about in the US, but I live in a fairly small city in Canada and we have DVD rentals. I go to the video store almost every week, and it was on the papers that a second one (which will also rent out VHS!) is opening. The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months. It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
0xEF 24d ago
Eh, I miss video rental stores in the US, but I don't agree that they would solve this problem. I worked for a large chain of them as a teen, and know first-hand that people were spending just as much on rentals as they do with subscription services, especially when you add in game rentals and late fees. More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
musha68k 24d ago
*UHD BluRay rentals but yes, hard agree. Also a great place to socialize and talk about which movie to rent traditionally.

koe123 24d ago

This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.

acd 24d ago

What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?

swingboy 24d ago
Piracy is one.
- whstl 24d ago
  If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.
  - anonym29 24d ago
    Often the same people behind both! Fun fact: pirates are more likely than the average person to purchase media. https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/internet-and-on-demand-research/online-copyright-infringement/copyright-infringement-tracker https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/another-day-another-study-that-says-pirates-are-best-customers-this-time-hadopi.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anoth...
  - 0xEF 24d ago
    I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD. I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state. *we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
    - 24d ago

not-so-darkstar 24d ago

[flagged]

tomhow 23d ago
We've banned this account.
- not-so-darkstar 22d ago
  [dead]

tjpnz 24d ago

I'm mostly down to one. It's called Daddyflix (Jellyfin, actually) and runs on a Mac Mini in my home office. Costs close to zero, is accessible everywhere and there's no ads or other bullshit.

BrissyCoder 24d ago
Yeah same. I have an agent running on it, so whenever one of my kids asks to watch something that their friends have told them about it, provided it's not retarded, I tell the agent to go find it and it shows up on the kids TV. No monthly bullshit (apart from the AI supscription I pay for anyway). Automated piracy. I love it.
- SwamyM 24d ago
  Is this different than what Radarr and similar tools do?
- voganmother42 24d ago
  Using the word “retarded” in 2026, you sound smart
  - machomaster 24d ago
    To try to tone police in 2026, you sound insufferable.
- bethekind 19d ago
  Curious do you have this setup or a howto anywhere?
asimovDev 24d ago
is it an old intel mac mini or ARM?
- tjpnz 24d ago
  M4 Pro but there are still builds for Intel based macs.

boxed 24d ago

Money comparisons that aren't inflation adjusted aren't "honest". They are in fact DIShonest.

immibis2 24d ago
How do you even measure inflation accurately, given the current government, and has there been 61% inflation over the last 5 years?
- boxed 24d ago
  Economists exists, we have data on this. Don't be silly.
  - immibis2 24d ago
    Is https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts economists?
vehemenz 24d ago
Which metric of inflation are you adjusting it to? And which assumptions are built into the goods and services measured, as well as their respective weights, of that index?
- boxed 24d ago
  That's a false dichotomy. An imperfectly measured inflation adjustment IS STILL VASTLY SUPERIOR to a non-adjusted number. By an enormous amount.
  - vehemenz 23d ago
    Sure. Which one? If it’s CPI just say CPI.

OroPla 24d ago

I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it. It is way cheaper long term.

sdcfgy 24d ago
Yeah that. I am mostly running on FLAC rips I did myself.
posh_somme 24d ago
Streaming services do not offer you what you like forever, they offer you what you didn't know about for the amount of time you need to watch it. So these are two different things
- bigblind 24d ago
  Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.
heaney-555 24d ago
>It is way cheaper long term. How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
- fdgfikgfv 24d ago
  There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)
  - rgavuliak 24d ago
    I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.

TazeTSchnitzel 24d ago

You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.

polarbearballs 24d ago
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched text in the world, but with such obviously machine made paper I'm not going to attempt to read it.
- matja 24d ago
  You're rejecting information solely based on the aesthetic quality of the delivery medium?
  - walrus01 24d ago
    Even if the information is accurate, I'm calling it low effort slop... Smart LLMs have basically automated producing a plausible looking "content farm".
Brendinooo 24d ago
This is such a weird take. Did you gatekeep people who built sites with FrontPage as well?
- TazeTSchnitzel 24d ago
  FrontPage didn't generate your content for you! So there was no reason to assume a FrontPage page might be meaningless just from how it looked. For AI-generated sites, though, if the page looks like slop, is it worth bothering to figure out if it actually is slop? It's not like they're uncorrelated variables. Sure, occasionally it won't be. But I'm drowning here. I must simply assume that if someone is serious about conveying a message, they won't package it in this form. I don't think it's even gatekeeping. You could copy-paste two tables and write two sentences into a Word document and export to HTML, one of the laziest possible ways to produce a website, and it'd still be less off-putting because it doesn't have the association with slop content.

nottorp 24d ago

Ok a price increase but: "nine streaming subscriptions". No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.

bnastic 24d ago
Apple Music, Netflix, Disney+, BBC. That's four. I don't want any of them. Three I have to take due to kids' nagging, the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
- jaffa2 24d ago
  Tell your kids ‘no’ Bring some sanity back to the world.
- mystifyingpoi 24d ago
  Easy, just make kids pay for these, if they need them this much.
- eptcyka 24d ago
  I never paid for the licence for I never used iPlayer and the investigators were welcomed into my house to take a look at the chromecast dongle.
- jbs789 24d ago
  The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk. I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use. But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british. I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked. Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.
  - nottorp 24d ago
    The "licensing" has a point because it does make the BBC more impartial since the current government cannot adjust their funding down or up depending on their programming. However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.

sdcfgy 24d ago

This is why I steal all my shit.

vehemenz 24d ago
Hear, hear.

LightBug1 24d ago

... which is why I opted out of all of that bullshit from the start. Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.

ahmedfromtunis 24d ago

Any price comparison over time should include inflation. Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference. Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.

deleted 24d ago
[deleted]
bko 24d ago
I think the point is that inflation numbers are bs. The official number from 2021 to today is 23%. But we didn't see prices only 23%. A restaurant mean didn't go from $20 to $25. It easily went up 50% or more. Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
- consensus1 24d ago
  I assume you got that > 50% number from actual CPI data and not just vibes, right?
  - bko 23d ago
    When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's literally trillions at stake for under-reporting these numbers. A lot of government benefits are tied to this not to mention political ramifications of high inflation. So I'll go with vibes (i.e. experienced reality) over some government re-balanced basket formula
astura 24d ago
Agreed, $95.91 a month in 2021-03 is $120.91 in July 2026 dollars. The current cost is $154.41, so it grew $33.50 a month after accounting for inflation. I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months. Tubi has better content than Disney+.

crumby 24d ago

Yup

stego-tech 24d ago

Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse). To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points. From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.

ericpauley 24d ago

AI;dr

crims0n 24d ago

Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red. Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.

consensus1 24d ago
Is that important context? I would say it's not. What if those companies already made massive profits and said "I think people are willing to pay more for this, so I'm going to raise the price." And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've raised the price of my services many times in my career for exactly the same reason.
Forgeties79 24d ago
They are the ones who set the market so that’s on them. They are the ones who set what people were willing to tolerate. If it’s not sustainable, then it’s not a good business. They aren’t entitled to existing. Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt: Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience. Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks

delegate 24d ago

BitTorrent: 0% increase. Just saying.

nekusar 24d ago
And Jellyfin for the server. And whatever leftover storage you have. And PIA or Proton for a port forwardable VPN. And https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video for that real Blockbuster experience.
ozgung 24d ago
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Tepix 24d ago
You need to rent a VPS (for $$$) to avoid litigation however. The those VPS have increased in price also.
- walrus01 24d ago
  Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar. The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.

walrus01 24d ago

From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026. 98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar. Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. " I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.

jbs789 24d ago
Yeah it was interesting to me that I identified it immediately. Perhaps been spending too much time w/ Claude It's capable of many different designs but this site tells me Rashid didn't even bother.
- walrus01 24d ago
  New proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...
  - zrail 24d ago
    I haven't tried it personally but my understanding from friends is that Pangram is very accurate, at least for now. https://www.pangram.com/ https://www.pangram.com/
    - walrus01 24d ago
      As a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium. Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.

axegon_ 24d ago

Hence the reason I ditched all of this. 1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me. 2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't). With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.

tyingq 24d ago
They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also. I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
- axegon_ 24d ago
  I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons: 1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2 2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything. 3. Price. 4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library. Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.

Lerc 24d ago

>At 2021-03 prices these four cost $1,150.92 a year. Today the same nine cost $1,852.92 Is that number really correct? It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to $1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56) It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.

boonzeet 24d ago
Forgive me but where does 1.10^5 come into the equation? What is the significance of this number? Both figures can be arrived to by taking the monthly total and multiplying it by 12.
- Lerc 24d ago
  1.1^5 is a 10 percent increase compounded 5 times.

abejora 24d ago

We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used: * They increased the cost of all price tiers. * They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more. * And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing. This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore. You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...

ivanbakel 24d ago
To play devil's advocate a bit: running software isn't free. If you're paying for an online service, the hosting cost to the company does scale per-seat. It's easy to say that the company only paid the cost of development once (and even then, more users = more development demand), but you're not a user of a single unit of developed software. For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
- Forgeties79 24d ago
  That may be the case but they are getting so aggressive that I am constantly having to reconfirm devices within my own home. Luckily I just run my own server now but we have HBO for free with my cell plan so that’s the ones subscription we still have. I have to do email 2FA probably every 4th or 5th time we open it because it’s on “too many devices.”

Brendinooo 24d ago

Still a great ecosystem and value for dollar overall! That's one reason why prices have gone up. No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services. Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).

library8848 24d ago
They will own nothing and be happy Are you a netflix exec by any chance?
- upsuper 24d ago
  I, for one, don't see any problem here. If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy. Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
- Brendinooo 24d ago
  Nope, not a Netflix exec. One would imagine if I was, I'd have used Netflix as my example. I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.) I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem. And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month. Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.

monomial 24d ago

I find that piracy is the only sane option any more

grandwizardmarv 24d ago
spot on
pepitodelospalo 24d ago
I pay for Prime and still prefer to torrent Amazon shows. The experience is just better.
- timpera 24d ago
  Prime's app is ridiculously bad imo. I'm not sure why that is, but everything is slower and takes more clicks and digging than similar apps on the same device. There are also significantly more ads than on Disney+ or Netflix ad tiers. I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.
- nosioptar 24d ago
  I was in the same boat with Netflix.
tripleee 24d ago
My wife had a free trial of Apple TV and we found we still preferred to use Jellyfin because it was a better experience
- footy 24d ago
  I haven't actually paid for Apple TV in some time but I remember thinking it had the worst interface of any streamer I've tried. Impossible to know which show card you had selected.

mococa 24d ago

Besides youtube premium (because kid) and apple one (because icloud) I have no more subscriptions. I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog. Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.

mulhoon 24d ago

Do you think in the future, maybe in 5 to 10 years, that the vibe coded aesthetic will come back as a design trend?

walrus01 24d ago
Welcome to 1997! https://cololocation.com/ https://cololocation.com/
newsy-combi 24d ago
15 years. The AI itself will be nostalgic for it.

BadBadJellyBean 24d ago

I like occasionally watching movies. I will rarely watch a movie twice. Streaming would be the best option for me, but I will not subscribe to more than one service. Get your shit together. Do cross licensing. Split production from distribution. Until then I will not be paying for any streaming service.

lotsofpulp 24d ago
Why would streaming be the best option for you to watch a movie once? You have long been able to rent movies with just a few clicks from many sellers. Maybe Netflix is the only one where you have to subscribe for a month to watch a movie.
- no-name-here 24d ago
  I picked a random film, Titanic, and supposedly it's $4 to rent on Amazon or Apple TV. A Netflix account costs $9 with ads or $20 without, so I guess it depends on whether you watch more or fewer films than that per month?
  - nosioptar 24d ago
    JFC, it didn't even cost $4 to rent titanic when it was new.

musha68k 24d ago

Mostly mediocre to bad entertainment and distractions anyways. I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.

emsign 24d ago
I buy CDs, DVDs and BluRays second hand. You can get pretty good deals because there's still people who sell their entire collection because "everything is available through streaming now!". I just hope there will be much more people who sell their old stuff in order to pay for those rising subscriptions prices.

pprotas 24d ago

Oh no! Anyways Claude set up an *arr stack, a torrent client and Jellyfin.

newsclues 24d ago

Jellyfin is free. Although more SSDs and HDDs are more expensive than in 2021.

deleted 24d ago

[deleted]

ViktorRay 24d ago

Why have the streaming costs increased so much? Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either. Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too? Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.

baggachipz 24d ago
Subsidized prices at launch to lure in customers. Then profit-seeking, by raising prices and offering less for the money. Textbook enshittification.

grandwizardmarv 24d ago

I cancelled majority of my services for this exact reason. I was a member of netflix since 2015, when I checked my credit card bill last month and saw the charge I really had to question if it was even worth it at this point.

rappatic 24d ago

I wish you’d at least take the effort to de-LLMify the vibecoded site and copy text

sneak 24d ago

Inflation over the last five years accounts for the first 25% of that 61% price increase. This means it’s only about +36% and not +61% as claimed. Huge difference.

written-beyond 24d ago

Absolute garbage article and garbage website. This content shouldn't be allowed on HN.

ticulatedspline 24d ago

meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration. You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99

zeroonetwothree 24d ago

Streaming is basically a sounding error in my budget. Now if we’re talking about food or health care…

apercu 24d ago

More expensive and worse in most ways. Just like most things in the current stage of oligopolies.

randusername 24d ago

Price increases are tolerated if the value increases. Even rent-seeking is tolerated if the value is relatively stable. But what we have here is value proposition decreasing from fragmentation and shallow content and increasingly intrusive targeted ads while the prices keep going up. We traded one annoying cable company for dozens.

georgeecollins 24d ago
Yes the price keeps going up, but every purchase is 100% optional. Please explain to me the reason why anyone needs any of these. What kind of person has all of these subscriptions? If you have YouTube TV and Spotify that is $22.

rythmshifter 24d ago

If buying ain’t owning, pirating ain’t stealing

amelius 24d ago
If buying ain't owning, then selling is stealing

robk3 24d ago

inflation inflating

psim1 24d ago

One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.

BeetleB 24d ago
I've gotten it many years, but rarely watched it, because my login keeps "expiring" on Roku. If I don't watch it for, say, a month, I'll need to log in again. It's terribly inconvenient. Hope they fix(ed) it.
- ravetcofx 24d ago
  Same happens with Canadian streaming services like CBC Gem and Knowledge network
- robocat 24d ago
  Unavailable outside US/Canada. See "Is Passport available outside of the U.S.?" section of: https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096220-common-questions https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096220-... PBS is not a producer, but rather a distributor of programming. Some details that imply workarounds might be difficult (although I suggest instead better to Google for how to access): https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096659-can-i-use-a-vpn-to-access-pbs-content- https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096659-... https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000694871-i-made-a-donation-but-did-not-receive-an-email-with-an-activation-code- https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000694871-i...
  - BeetleB 24d ago
    Did you respond to the wrong comment? This is not about being outside the US or using a VPN. This is about the pain of having to repeatedly log in.
    - 24d ago

Aurornis 24d ago

Several of these services launched around 2021 with introductory pricing, which is necessary for attracting new users to a new service. Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.

toss1 24d ago
Corollary to that is the then-newish services had less content now. A higher price alone for the same "tier" does not necessarily mean less value. I'd want to also estimate the overall quantity and quality offered for the higher price. Obviously, quality is subjective, but for each of those services, does a e.g., 43% increase in cost come with a greater or less than 43% increase in available selection? Does it have more or less higher/lower-rated or more/less watched content? More/fewer shows that are truncated after the first one or two seasons?

tamimio 24d ago

Notice this increase didn’t reflect in significant higher salaries for the people working in these companies (not the executives) nor more hiring, quite the opposite, more lay offs. This small indicator tells really what’s going on in the economy, more profit to the corps but people still are getting poorer, same thing applies btw to other domains like groceries or other goods or even housing. It’s a wealth distribution problem, it’s not AI, not supply chain shortages, not immigrants, non of these distractions that get pushed around, since covid, these companies and the ones who pull the strings in nations, they discovered and tested something that can easily manipulate the public and make them ok with worse living conditions: fear! If you scare the public enough about a topic and play the fear mongering tactics rights, you have a golden key to control the public: covid, wars, immigrants, protect the kids, AGI, etc etc are all topic of manipulations, follow the money and the people behind them.

burlesona 24d ago

[dead]

nater5000 24d ago

The title kind of buries important details about the distribution of these costs and their changes. For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change. So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price. Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait. And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021. All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.

ArnoVW 24d ago
I think the point is that we are no longer in the world of Netflix in 2015, where all shows are available. Even if you watch « only » 5 shows, if they are on five different services then that means 5 subscriptions. Or you spend time planning and organizing subscriptions. .. or you just download them.
xboxnolifes 24d ago
The title means exactly what it says and the expanded details are nearly as close to the top of the article and as clearly presented as possible. Why does every article on HN need to find some excuse to make a complaint about the title?

maxglute 24d ago

TFW Plex lifetime and plexamp for $75.

gruturo 24d ago

The raise is even worse if you look further back than 2021. Netflix was 7.99 for ages, while the "floor" in 2021 is 13.99. Against the original baseline, the new 19.99 price is not a +43% but a +150%. Most importantly 13.99 already in 2021 bought LESS than 7.99 or 8.99 bought until a while before. Thanks to the fragmentation, the catalogue was way larger before, and as of 2022 ads were introduced to further insult the customer. High seas it is.

shevy-java 24d ago

They always try to milk people. It is the same scheme: 1) offer services at comparatively high quality (or at the least not too low in quality) at a fairly cheap price, ideally flat rate 2) lateron increase it to milk the cash cows 3) profit

e12e 24d ago

Equivalent to 10% year-to-year, every year - assuming 5 years. That is somewhat steep.

adventured 24d ago

There was a ~18 month period of time where prices went up 50-100% at stores like CVS and Walgreens. The large subscription price increases are merely matching the real inflation explosion we're seeing from the debasement of the USD due to extreme budget deficits and massive over-spending. Gold also has been correctly reflecting that procession for many years now. Which is to say it's not the streaming prices, it's everything (except for maybe televisions, for now we get to keep our cheapish 50-80" TVs).

0gs 24d ago

saying "the exact same products" when the products in question are constantly expanding (and occasionally contracting) libraries of video content is definitely "a move"

miguelfrreg 23d ago

I'm launching a small SaaS this week and the only pricing promise I made to early customers is that their price never goes up Threads like this are most of the reason

aimarkdeck 23d ago

[flagged]