If you have the $7.99 per month plan with Netflix already, then the news that your bill is probably about to increase to $9.99 won’t worry you. We all heard this day would come; but some of us (a.k.a. me) chose to pretend it would never actually happen and the subscription would hold steady at $7.99 for the rest of eternity.
The idea of paying an extra $24 per year for the same service bothers me, okay? That said, my dependence on Netflix has gotten to a point where I’m not sure I would cancel my subscription … I mean, unless they raised the price a lot. But how much is “a lot,” really? Is this like a frog-in-boiling-water situation where I’m not going to notice until my Netflix bill exceeds the average cost of a cable TV bill, which is apparently $99 (holy crap)?!
Anyway, your Netflix bill is probably about to go up. You can find out when and if that will happen by logging in and navigating to the “Your Account” page in the drop-down at the top right. Look for “Plan Details,” where you’ll find a section that looks like this:
As you can see, my plan will start costing me $9.99 starting this May 9th (sigh). If I really wanted to pinch pennies and stick with my current $7.99 price point, though, I could click on that “Change plan” link and select a downgraded version of my service, which would include only one screen (rather than the two I have now) and only plays in Standard Definition rather than HD (like I have now). Either I pay the same $7.99 bill and get worse service, or I pay more to keep what I already have. Blech!
This feels like cosmic payback, since it was only a few weeks ago that I wrote an article about Netflix’s significant monopoly in the streaming realm; I even made mention of how “affordable” the service seems. Sure, there’s other competitors like Hulu and Amazon, but people like Netflix the best. And Netflix has enough data on all of us to know that’s true.
How much more could they hike up that price before you’d jump off the Netflix train? $15? $30? By comparison, Hulu only costs $7.99, but the ad-free version costs $11.99 (still pricier than Netflix’s upcoming $9.99 hike). All of this stuff is going to start adding up, huh? Sure, it’s cheaper than a $99 cable bill, but … for how long?
(via Jezebel)
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