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Depending on your subscription plan, the price hike adds up to an extra $24 or $36 you pay each year to the streaming service. Below, CNBC Select shares some ways to save on (and even benefit from) your Netflix subscription.
While you're unlikely to be happy about paying a higher monthly Netflix bill, it does mean you earn a bit more from that 6% cash back. Amex's cash back is earned in the form of Reward Dollars, which cardholders can then use as a statement credit to lower their credit card balance.
And with the U.S. Bank Cash+ Visa Signature Card, cardholders can choose to earn 5% cash back on two bonus categories each quarter, on their first $2,000 in combined eligible net purchases, then 1%. Television, internet and streaming services are counted as a bonus category and U.S. Bank's website lists Netflix as a sample qualifying merchant. Again, you can use this cash back to essentially lower your credit card bill.
T-Mobile has a "Netflix On Us" deal where qualifying cell phone plans get a free Netflix subscription. Those who aren't happy with their current cell phone provider should consider this benefit, which not only makes Netflix complimentary but also consolidates your streaming and cell phone bill.
Netflix allows you to pause your membership and come back to it. This can give you a break from the monthly subscription if you're looking to cut costs or if you're just not watching a particular show at the moment.
You just have to connect the bank account you use to pay your Netflix subscription to Experian Boost, and Experian will add your payments to your Experian credit file. Consumers can link positive payment data as far back as 24 months. Experian Boost also includes access to your FICO Score and Experian free credit monitoring that alerts you to changes on your credit report, such as new account openings in your name and balance updates.
Basic and Premium plan Netflix subscribers will now pay a little more each month for the streaming service. To help save on this cost, get a credit card that rewards streaming purchases, switch your phone plan to T-Mobile or take a pause on your subscription. And, while you're paying more for it, make sure that monthly Netflix bill is helping your credit with Experian Boost.
At CNBC Select, our mission is to provide our readers with high-quality service journalism and comprehensive consumer advice so they can make informed decisions with their money. Every personal finance article is based on rigorous reporting by our team of expert writers and editors with extensive knowledge of personal finance products. While CNBC Select earns a commission from affiliate partners on many offers and links, we create all our content without input from our commercial team or any outside third parties, and we pride ourselves on our journalistic standards and ethics.
Netflix has announced that it added 8.8 million new subscribers during the third quarter of 2023. This increase comes after the streaming service cracked down on password sharing and forcing former free riders to open their own accounts. The service now has roughly 247 million subscribers worldwide. The growth in subscriptions comes along with growth in revenue. The company saw its revenue increase by 8% to $8.5 billion.
For its next move, the company also announced it is increasing subscription fees on its lowest-priced and heist-priced ad-free plans. The lower tier plan will increase from $10 to $12 per month, while the higher tier plan will increase from $21 to $23. The price of the mid-tier plan will remain at $15.50 per month and the plan with commercials will remain at $7 per month. Rather than lose customers completely, Netflix believes most who do not wish to pay the higher prices will opt for the plan with advertising. Increasing these numbers will help the company increase their advertising revenue, while increasing the revenue for those who remain in their current plans. The higher revenues will allow the company to further invest in original content, which could also attract new subscribers.
The bad news about Netflix pricing is that its price hikes and raises seem inevitable. For all the new shows and movies that the big red streaming machine gets, this is an understandable downside for one of the best streaming services. That said, the cheaper Netflix with ads is here, and it's ... well, not great.
The latest news on Netflix's pricing is the death of the ad-free basic tier. Now, there's just Standard with Ads. If the company will continue to spend, spend, spend on its ever-growing library of exclusive Netflix Originals its subscribers will keep footing the bill.
On top of that, Netflix is charging $8 per month to add a household, as an "extra member." This is meant to curb account-sharing, one of the Netflix tricks we've previously recommended to get the most out of your monthly payment. And since we're in a moment where it seems many are starved for more Netflix, most people will likely keep paying for the service.
This is all happening after the most-recent Netflix price hike hit new subscribers in January 2022. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that this led to Netflix announced its first subscriber loss in over a decade. And as we'll detail below, this isn't the only Netflix price increase in recent history.
Netflix isn't the only streaming service raising prices, as a $1 per month increase just hit Peacock. So, let's break down the new pricing, how much of a jump it is off of last year's pricing, and what you get.
Netflix's most popular plan, the $15.49 per month Standard tier, gets you up to two streams at once in up to Full HD (1080p). It's likely the most popular plan for two reasons. Firstly, the proliferation of 4K TVs and 4K content isn't going as fast as some may want. Also: people may just not need the four simultaneous streams and 4K HDR quality in the Premium plan.
Netflix's rules for downloading episodes on devices differs by your plan. Standard with ads subscribers can't (because ads need to be served live), Standard subscribers get to download on 2 devices and Premium get six (formerly 4).
Over time, we've seen small and large gaps of time between Netflix price increases, and the most recent increase was one of the shortest, at 15 months (the same gap between its 2017 and 2019 increases).
Based on recent history, we wouldn't expect a Netflix pricing increase until fall 2023. It could happen sooner, especially if Netflix's games becomes something it thinks it can charge more for. But for now, it seems like we'll be waiting a little bit before Netflix pricing goes up again.
Example: I have 100 customers paying $10 for their subscription. I want to raise the price to $11. The only way to do that is to cancel the subscription and create a new one. That WILL result in lost customers. Imagine if Netflix required customers to cancel their subscription and rejoin every time they had a price increase.
Squarespace employees don't routinely monitor this forum for feedback (see the guidelines - item 7) so it's important for anyone affected to raise a feature request formally through Squarespace Customer Support. Circle members can also upvote my request for this feature.
We also have this issue, and have been asking about it for a few years now. We got an email today stating website subscriptions were going up, which is fine, but the email notification for the adjustment is something we should have access to. Just being able to adjust for inflation, demand, expansion or a price hike should be available.
I understand the legacy aspect of it, therefore an email notification should be in place so that the customers would be informed of the price increase and choose to cancel their subscription if not in agreement with the price increase proposal. I think that's what Netflix did for example, right ? I can easily imagine that thousands of businesses like us and using squarespace, will have to increase the pricing of their loyal recurring customers to cope with the worldwide inflation phenomen. I hope the squarespace team is looking into this topic for a while now and that something will come up soon. I have just sent now an email to the support team, but it feels that I will just get the usual "we will pass it on to the team for future review" and nothing will happen... Thanks Paul anyhow for taking the time to reply to my question. Much appreciated.
Is there a way to do this via Stripe somehow? It looks like whenever a customer creates a subscription via Squarespace, their payment details are viewable in the Stripe dashboard. It also looks like Stripe allows you to create subscriptions for all of those customers from within Stripe. So maybe there's a potential workaround?
Just catching up on this one... Listen, EVERYONE is increasing their prices right now due to inflation and I have not had to cancel and resubscribe to anything. Youtube, increased. Netflix, increased. Apple subscriptions, increased. SQUARESPACE subscription, increased... just to name a few... Funny how my business subscription with you can be increased with just an email notification, but I cannot do the same with my customers.
It is absolutely insanity that Squarespace doesn't allow this! Let us (the client) increase our product pricing, and when that happens, anyone who is recurring should get an email notifying them of the increase, which we can follow up with a change management communication to ensure churn is mitigated. Making our customers cancel their subscription and resubscribe so that we can get paid what the market prices are now is NOT a solution Squarespace. This has to be addressed. Immediately. There are a number of feature requests that have been submitted for this by me (The Little Flower Truck) as well as others, and you have yet to do anything about it.
Although Stripe make this feature available on their platform, Squarespace does not currently support changing subscription pricing. Subscriptions that are managed through Squarespace commerce cannot be changed at the moment.
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