Subscription Sticker Shock: Streaming Video, Music, Storage, and More (Premium)

You’ve all seen the news: the prices of the online services we all subscribe to are going up this year. That it’s time to scale back is obvious, but the good news is that we have more choices than ever. And that’s especially true of streaming video services, which feel like the obvious place to start this discussion.

First, I’ll use myself as an example of what not to do: we subscribe to an embarrassing number of streaming video services, in part because we still (partially) support our kids despite them being adults and out of the house. And we usually pay for the most expensive versions of those services when there’s a choice, for the same reason.

(Interestingly, in querying the kids about this, I learned that our son Mark is mostly not using the services we pay for and has instead pretty much moved on to splitting the cost of most of this with his roommates, and so it’s just our daughter Kelly on most of these plans. Mark still uses our Apple TV+ account, and Kelly uses Hulu, Netflix, and Apple TV+, in that order.)

This is going to change. But first, let me lay out my embarrassment in painful detail. We currently pay for the following streaming video services:

Apple TV+. Semi-unique among the top-tier streaming video services, Apple has not raised prices this year on Apple TV+, which provides original content (TV shows, mostly), a growing collection of live sports events (like two MLB baseball games each Friday night), and more. Also semi-unique to Apple TV+, it’s free to share with up to five family members. And it’s just $6.99 per month, which makes it a good value.

Disney Bundle Trio Premium. This bundled combines Disney+ (No ads), Hulu (No ads), and ESPN+ (with ads) for $19.99 per month. I’m sure the Star Wars content on Disney+ is what swayed me to upgrade from Hulu (no ads) to this bundle. But we pretty much only watch Hulu, as does our daughter.

Max Legacy Ad-Free. I guess I’m on some grandfathered tier of the former HBO Max, which offers original content (movies and TV series) plus a nice collection legacy HBO and Discovery content, the latter of which includes many TV series from Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, TLC, and more. Our plan is $15.99 per month, but you can’t even see what the details are now. It’s been replaced by an Ad-Free plan ($15.99 per month, stream on 2 devices, Full HD resolution, and 30 downloads) and an Ultimate Ad-Free plan ($19.99 per month, stream on 4 devices, 4K Ultra HD resolution, and 100 downloads).

Netflix Premium Ultra HD. Ad-free, download videos on six devices, Ultra HD (4K) video quality where available. Cost: $19.99 per month. (We could also buy “extra member” slots at $7.99 per child per month, but this is one we’ve gotten out of somehow. Our daughter, in North Carolina, says our Netflix still works for her. Our son, in Rochester, NY, is no longer using our account.)

Prime Video. Amazon’s video service is included in its Prime subscription and it’s mostly low-quality from a content perspective, though it has had some decent original content across TV series, movies, and stand-up comedy in recent years too. Amazon Prime costs $14.99 and we’re not getting rid of it, but non-Prime members could subscribe to just Prime Video for $8.99 per month. I can’t imagine why anyone would do that.

YouTube Premium. This service exists primarily to provide an ad-free experience for YouTube, which I think is crucial. But I got in through a back-door which had, until this coming month, saved me money each month: I subscribe to (and prefer) YouTube Music ($9.99 per month), and one perk of that service is that you get YouTube Premium (which had been $11.99 per month) too. Now, the prices are going up, and it’s happening to both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, so my monthly cost will be $13.99. That’s $4 more per month, but I do use both services heavily. (I will look at music separately, but my wife and kids all use Spotify and none would ever switch.)

If you add that all up, and I briefly paused to genuflect before doing so, despite being non-religious, you will find that we spend over $75 per month on streaming video (not counting Amazon Prime). So something has to give, and in the process of confronting the cost of each service noted above in turn, I saw some obvious places to prune. But first, let’s consider a few general strategies that anyone might use to lower costs, no matter which services you use.

The first is one I came up with individually, though it’s fairly obvious, and so I’ve now seen this advice in many other places too. It’s also unique to video streaming services. And it goes like this: pay for and use one service each month, binge-watching as you go, and then switch to a different service the next month. (Or whatever schedule.) For example, you could subscribe to Netflix in January, Hulu in February, and so on.

If that’s too radical, you could keep more than one service each month, of course. For example, we feel that YouTube Premium is the single most valuable video streaming service we use because of its vast trove of content. And so I could imagine keeping YouTube Premium plus one other service, where we rotate the second service month-to-month.

If that’s not radical enough, and you have a healthy collection of physical media—or, better still, a collection of purchased video content—you could also consider doing a streaming video fast, so to speak, and cancel everything temporarily. Then, for whatever period of time, you could simply watch the content you already own. I imagined doing this if we had ever decided to tour the country in an RV: we have hundreds of TV shows and movies in Apple (much of which is available anywhere Movies Anywhere is available) and then hundreds more movie files on our NAS. But for a variety of reasons, that never came to pass.

It’s more likely that you could simply cut costs by sticking with fewer services and/or moving to less expensive versions of your favorite services. This is highly subjective—everyone values different services more than others, of course—but there’s also a new wrinkle that will likewise appeal to some but not to others: many services today come in both ad-free and ad-supported versions, and the latter are often much less expensive. Assuming come stomach the ads.

I cannot. But let’s use Netflix as an obvious example.

As noted above, I’m paying for Netflix Premium Ultra HD at $19.99 per month, and the big draws—to me—are the 4K video quality and lack of ads. I could save $4.50 per month (at a total cost of $15.49 per month) by moving to Netflix Standard, which would lower the video quality to Full HD (1080p). But if I could put up with ads, I could save $13 per month (!) at a total cost of $6.99 per month by subscribing to Netflix Standard with Ads, which also offers Full HD video quality. That is an incredible savings, albeit one I am not willing to take. And other services offer similar savings. For example, Disney+ is about to get more expensive, but only the ad-free tiers. So Disney+ Premium (no ads) will soon cost $13.99 per month, while Disney+ Basic, which differs only in that it has ads, will stay at $7.99 per month. Pricing for Hulu and Max (and Paramount Plus and Peacock) likewise offer incredible savings if you go with an ad-based plan.

Some services, like Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video do not offer ad-based versions, though Amazon does have a separate and free video streaming service, Freevee, that is ad-supported. And there are many other free, ad-supported video streaming services, like Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Tubi, and some even have live TV options. You just gotta put up with the ads.

It’s possible that your mobile carrier offers you free or reduced cost access to one or more video streaming services too. You’ll have to check with your carrier, but I subscribe to T-Mobile Magenta 55+ at a cost of $50 per month (with auto-pay), for example, and among the perks of this plan is free access to Apple TV+ for six months, a roughly $42 value … and one I have not taken advantage of for some reason. (If you do go this route, the monthly cost of Apple TV+ will be added to your monthly cellular bill after the 6-month freebie period is over.)

You might also find offers from your credit card companies. We have an American Express gold card, for example, and browsing through the card’s benefits site, I found offers for three video streaming services: an annual subscription for Max with $25 back, spend $11 or more on Paramount+ with Showtime and get $11 back (making it almost free, and for up to three months), and spend $9.99 or more on a Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle and get $9.99 (for up to six months). Managing credit card benefits can be time-consuming and feel like a second career, and we tend to focus on travel-related perks, but this is an interesting thing to investigate.

So. We’ve established that everyone is different, that everyone will have different services that matter most to them, and that some people can tolerate ads (and perhaps just in certain services) while others cannot. What I am going to do to save money?

Well, as I went through the actual prices that I pay (or will soon pay) for the services to which we subscribe, I obviously thought about how we could retain a reasonable amount of choices but also save a meaningful amount of money each month. I also considered my kids’ needs: Kelly identified Hulu, Netflix, and Apple TV+ as her most-watched services, and Mark is only using Apple TV+. And so the first decision was easy: we’re keeping Apple TV+, as we all use it, it’s inexpensive at just $6.99 per month, and it offers free family sharing. That one is almost a no-brainer.

I figured that my Disney+ bundle had to go, as we rarely watch Disney+ or ESPN+. But my wife and I, and Kelly, all watch Hulu. And Hulu (no ads) is $14.99 now, but it’s about to go up to $17.99, and that’s enough to make me want to cancel it outright. But we do watch it, and the bundle is only $2 more per month. So it makes sense to keep it. I did not see that one coming.

With regard to Max, my wife and I identified a dozen or two TV show episodes to watch (things like Mexico episodes of House Hunters International), so we’re going to binge those at lunch and dinner over the next week or so and then cancel this service, saving us $15.99 per month.

Netflix is a tough one. We watch a lot of Netflix content, and I wonder if I’d be unhappy with the 1080p quality offered by the Netflix Standard tier. This will save us $4.50 per month, however, so I’m going to give it a shot.

Prime video is essentially free, as it’s a perk of the Prime subscription that we will not be canceling. So there’s nothing we can do there.

And we’re likewise stuck with YouTube Premium: as noted, I get this service through YouTube Music and I use both services (YouTube Premium and YouTube Music) extensively. There is no savings to be had there: it will soon cost $13.99 per month.

Add that up, and I am going to save $20.49, bringing my total monthly cost of video streaming services down to about $56. That’s good, I guess, but if I could kill the Disney bundle, that would lower the cost to a much more reasonable $36 or so. And I would love to get it there. But that’s kind of the kid tax, I guess. (I can and likely will take T-Mobile up on its 6-month Apple TV+ offer, however, which will save me $6.99 each month for six months; so my total will be about $48 per month during that time.)

One thing not factored into any of this, because I don’t personally need such a thing, is live TV. And live TV is expensive. YouTube TV, for example, costs $72.99 per month, while Hulu + Live TV will soon cost $76.99 per month (with ads on non-live TV content) or $89.99 per month (with no ads). Ye Gods. Maybe it’s time to look into an HDTV antenna, since the content is free.

And then there are other kinds of services, like music. As noted, we pay for both YouTube Music (soon to be $13.99 per month) and Spotify Premium Family, which costs $16.99 per month and supports up to 6 separate accounts. I use YouTube Music and will not switch, and the rest of my family uses Spotify and will not switch. So we’re stuck. But if they could stomach it, there’s always the ad-supported Spotify Free. I won’t bother asking.

Our other big monthly subscription outlay is on cloud storage. Here, there are multiple services too:

Apple iCloud+. I subscribe to an iCloud+ 200 GB plan for $2.99 per month because my kids and I need it for device backups. It supports sharing with up to five family members.

Google Drive. I pay Google $99.99 per year for 1 TB of additional storage on my primary Workspace account, which I use primarily for photos.

Google One. My wife pays Google $2.99 per month for 200 GB of extra storage, for photos.

Microsoft 365 Family. We have a Microsoft 365 Family account that gives everyone in the family full access to Office and 1 TB of OneDrive storage. This costs $99.99 per year, but I’m paid up through May 2028 thanks to various gift cards.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic. And while this isn’t personal, I do also pay Microsoft $6 per month for Microsoft Business Basic so I can keep up on the commercial side of that business. This account also has 1 TB of OneDrive storage but I don’t really use it for anything.

Add all that up and it’s about $29 per month. But there’s more. Of course, there’s more.

I have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription that’s normally $16.99 per month, though I’m paid up through November 2024 thanks to various gift cards and other offers. And I pay Apple $24.99 for iTunes Match, which lets me stream my ripped CD library from the cloud if need be; I don’t use that much, but rather treat it as a form of backup (and could see getting rid of it, of course).

And my head is spinning. There is no end to it, really. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something.