Users Once Again Annoyed As Netflix Once Again Raises Prices

It’s fairly obvious that Netflix won the first round of the streaming TV wars.

Here’s the thing: as subscriber growth becomes saturated, Netflix has to keep providing Wall Street with those sweet, improved quarterly returns at any cost. To do that they’re going to follow directly on the heels of the cable giants (like Charter and Spectrum) the company once disrupted. That means more and more price hikes, and greater and greater restrictions and annoyances.

That also means lots of corner cutting, a sag in overall quality, weird new nickel-and-diming restrictions (like the company’s crackdown on password sharing), eliminating your cheapest and most popular consumer options to drive them to more expensive products, and just generally pummeling customers with price hikes. Oh, and when you’re really out of ideas, shitty mergers to goose stock valuations.

Netflix this week announced that it’s once again raising prices for its ad-free and ad-based subscriptions. Its standard plan without ads is rising $2.50 — from $15.49 to $18.00 per month. Its cheapest ad-based tier is now $8 per month, up $1. They’re also raising prices on various other things, like the cost of higher-end tiers that allow simultaneous streams, or the cost of adding an extra member to an account.

Just like U.S. cable companies used to do, Netflix insists these price hikes are necessary to continue improving “value” to Netflix subscribers:

“As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix,” the company said in its quarterly letter to investors. “To that end, we are adjusting prices today across most plans in the U.S., Canada, Portugal and Argentina (which was already factored into the 2025 guidance we provided in October 2024).”

Of course that’s not how Wall Street or enshittification works. Wall Street doesn’t want Netflix doing the things customers and employees actually want: investing in better quality (read: often more expensive) content, paying employees better, improving customer service, or lowering prices. The hunt for impossible, unlimited growth is an entirely extractive, cannibalistic affair. It’s how we got Comcast.

You can operate this way… for a while. Clearly many Netflix customers still see value in what Netflix offers at the price point it offers it.  Netflix now has over 300 million subscribers and last quarter saw its revenues jump 16 percent. It saw 18.9 million new subscribers last quarter, up from the 13 million new subscribers it added a quarter earlier.

The major reason for Netflix’s latest growth is its ad-based tiers. The streaming giants want to shift from ad-free subscriptions to ad-based subscriptions because ultimately they can squeeze the consumer with price hikes on one end, while squeezing advertisers with higher ad rates on the other. Double the exploitation potential, double the fun.

But again this only works for so long. Ultimately you push your luck, service quality dips below an acceptable bar, and users increasingly start shifting to competitors, free video services, or piracy. At which point, as per cable industry tradition, executives will blame everybody but themselves for their sharp but avoidable reversal in fortunes. And the whole disruption cycle starts all over again.