Netflix Raised Prices Again, And Streaming Services Should Be Worried About My Reaction

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I got an email this morning from Netflix letting me know they’re raising the price of my plan next month. To my surprise, I felt nothing. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t mad. I didn’t fire off an angry tweet. I didn’t even mention it to my wife. I just moved on with my day because in 2026, this is just what it means to subscribe to streaming services.

At the beginning of 2025, I paid $15.49 per month for Netflix without ads. Then the price changed to $17.99 per month. Now it’s changing on May 1st to $19.99 per month. A year or two from now, it’ll be $21.99 per month. Then it’ll be $24.99 per month. Some day sooner than we’d like to admit, it’ll be $29.99 per month.

It might sound like I’m specifically calling out Netflix, but I could have just as easily used one of the other streaming services as the pricing example. When I first subscribed to Peacock in 2022, it was $5.00 a month for the ad-free option. Now, if you want Peacock without ads, it’s $16.99 a month. In 2018, Amazon Prime was $99 a year, and all the content was ad-free. Now it’s $139 a year, plus there’s an upcharge if you want to remove the ads from content. Pick whatever premium streaming service you want to talk about, and chances are the price has gone up somewhere between 40% and 100% over the last five years.

I used to get really angry every single time the price of one of these services changed. I’d complain to my friends or write an article talking about how frustrated I was. It really bothered me because I felt like I was getting ripped off, but that’s not the case anymore. Now, I think, well, this is just how it goes with streaming services. That radical acceptance might sound like a good thing for streamers, but it should actually be very worrying. You know why? Because the last time I felt this exact same way was when I finally got rid of cable.

I can’t imagine a more loyal cable subscriber than me. I rolled my eyes every single time someone said they cut the cord. I was convinced I’d find a way to keep subscribing to one of the major providers for the next hundred years from beyond the grave, but then the ridiculous charges just started coming one after another. An extra fee for HD. An extra fee to have cable in multiple rooms. Plans that forced me to pay for MTV 2 and ESPN News if I wanted other channels in the same tier. Price hikes in order to prevent outages of network TV stations I was supposed to be getting for free.

For years, I got really upset every single time my bill jumped from $101 a month to $106 a month to $111 a month. I’d call and argue with the cable company and ask them to put me on a promo rate to knock a few bucks off the tab. Sometimes it would work. Sometimes it wouldn’t. But as the bill got closer and closer to $200 a month, I stopped fighting. I just quietly accepted a few more increases before my wife and I talked and called UVerse to unsubscribe. I wasn’t interested in their pleas to keep me or promises of discounted rates for six months. I was done.

Well, that’s how I’m starting to feel about streaming.

There are a lot of customers who (smartly) play the promo game. They subscribe and unsubscribe and hopscotch between all the major streamers so they’re always on some kind of cheap, introductory rate. That’s not me. I’m part of the silent majority that just quietly subscribes with no plan to bail. I am exactly what companies want out of a subscriber.

I have YouTube TV, plus all the major streamers. I don’t mind paying a premium for access to entertainment options, but I’m starting to get worn down. It’s two dollars here and two dollars there, only to discover deep cut content I enjoy is being removed to save money on residuals. It’s another two dollars here and another two dollars there, only to discover ad-free doesn’t apply to certain kinds of programming. It’s another two dollars here and another two dollars there, only to see relatively popular shows I like get cancelled because they’re not driving new sign-ups.

I’m tired and feel like I’m being taken advantage of, especially considering Netflix is bragging about record profits. I feel exactly like I did before I cancelled cable. That should scare every major streaming service because they should be wondering how many other core subscribers are just like me.