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

honestlyranked

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 Method: 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.

ivanjermakov

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

mbeavitt

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).

throwaway_ab

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!

koe123

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

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?

tjpnz

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.

boxed

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

OroPla

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.

TazeTSchnitzel

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.

nottorp

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.

sdcfgy

This is why I steal all my shit.

LightBug1

... 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

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.

stego-tech

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.

crims0n

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.

delegate

BitTorrent: 0% increase. Just saying.

walrus01

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.