It may not be quite as politically buzzy as the price of gasoline or eggs, but another household expense is going up for millions of people. Disney has brought the price-gouging experience of its theme park home again by raising the prices of most iterations and bundles of its Disney+ and Hulu streaming services. Whether you pay to watch them with or without ads, separately or bundled together, you’re probably getting a price hike of a couple of bucks per month. The few bundles that will remain the same price feature ad-supported versions of both services (plus ESPN). Don’t worry, though; paying extra to avoid the ad-supported versions of those services won’t mean that you’re missing out on some cross-promotional opportunities. Disney’s terms of service note that they reserve the right to insert ads before and after programming on whatever subscription tier they want, regardless of what you’re paying for. True magic!
This particular magic isn’t reserved for Disney, though. Price hikes among streaming services have become so common that The Verge has a dedicated page aggregating the news of them, which tends to arrive every few months. Apple, apparently high on Emmy fumes, has raised its prices four times in four years, keeping pace with many of its competitors despite a vastly smaller dedicated catalog. Depending on which version of Peacock subscribers use, they’ve seen their bills padded by five or six dollars a month just since the summer of 2025, including another increase last month. Netflix, meanwhile, hasn’t gone up since March 2026. That’s not a reprieve; that’s a sign another hike must be around the corner.
Consumers have noticed. Reportedly an estimated 39% of Americans canceled a streaming service in the past six months due to what’s been dubbed “streamflation”. Another survey indicates that a majority of people subscribe to at least three such services, which is consistent with estimates of streaming households spending about $70 per month. Access to the six big streaming services (Netflix, Disney+/Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount+, Apple TV, Peacock) will boost that number somewhere in the neighborhood of $120, on top of which subscribers need broadband internet for the services to actually work. For the total price, you might as well call the whole thing Cable+, in that it’s like your old cable bill, only there’s more of it. No wonder cancellations are rampant.
To retain subscribers without putting the screws directly to them, it might be viable for streaming companies to stabilize annual prices – typically a discounted lump-sum payment covering a full year of a service – even when raising monthly costs. Some, like Netflix, don’t offer this option. While those that do have kept annual subscriptions cheaper than the a year’s worth of month-to-month, companies don’t seem interested in maintaining bargain levels. The annual price for Disney+ at launch was $70. Now it’s $190, an increase of 170% – presumably to stay competitive with eggs. Amazon Prime, whose streaming service began as a perk for members already paying an annual membership fee for unlimited shipping and other benefits, has also risen while inserting more ads into its programming and downgrading the picture quality. You want higher resolution and fewer ads? That’s another $50 a year.
The reasons for all this shameless gauging are pretty simple: Wall Street doesn’t just demand profits (though those have sometimes been scarce in the streaming world) but endless growth, and some services don’t have all that much more room, realistically, to sign up more users any more. Netflix has 325 million subscribers worldwide. What’s their reach goal? 500 million? Three billion? What happens when everyone on Earth with an internet connection and a credit card already has Netflix?
Not every service is so close to a saturation point (unless you count electricity as a streaming service). But it’s notable that even a supposedly lower-tier streamer like Peacock commands over 40 million monthly subscribers, equivalent to more than 10% of the United States population. (It’s a heavily US-skewing service, so unlike Netflix those users aren’t especially global.) By comparison, the biggest magazine in the US has a subscriber base of around half that (and that’s the AARP magazine, an outlier in that it’s distributed to paying members). The New York Times, considered an especially successful recent example of the subscription model, has 13 million subscribers. The AMC Stubs A-List program that allows moviegoers to see four films a week has about 1 million.
That’s all to say that streaming has unprecedented reach, which means the only realistic way to boost profits is to either raise subscription prices, or make less stuff. The latter might sound ridiculous, especially given that we’ve been living in the post-boom age for streaming shows for a while now. Then again, that’s worked out well for the catalog-based Tubi, whose original works are lower-profile and lower-budget than its competitors. One of several free streaming services, Tubi outstrips some of those paid competitors in market share and turns a profit based only on its ads.
Watching a movie or a show on a free service isn’t exactly an optimal experience; there are those ad breaks, sometimes the transfers aren’t top-notch, and the content churn tends to be a little faster than the subscription streamers. It’s definitely not a place where you can catch much of anything nominated for an Emmy in the past five or six years (though some Oscar movies or second-tier popular hits from that period might turn up). On the other hand, free streamers often manage to under-promise and over-deliver; at a time when paid subscriptions seem eager to offer less than ever, especially in the quite broad field of films made before 1995, Tubi, PlutoTV and their ilk always have at least a couple dozen stone-cold classics on hand that more than make up for not including the latest big-name time-wasters (looking at you, Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson sitcom where they play themselves!). And the price always stays the same.
Still, some free streaming services with surprisingly robust and shifting catalogs aren’t exactly the dream of cord-cutting that was fed to consumers throughout the 2010s. The initial idea was to shed the bloat from all-or-nothing cable services that hold monopolies, or something close to it, in plenty of geographic areas. Competition for subscribers would keep good deals in the offing. Instead, what’s been happening over the past five years or so is a redistribution of that money from one set of giant companies to another. There’s slightly more consumer control over the size of the bills, in the sense that, yes, it’s possible to cancel a couple of services in a way that picking and choosing individual cable channels wasn’t possible outsidea few premium subscriptions. But there’s also far less clarity about how to catch the best shows and movies of any given year. For ages, it was mostly a simple formulation: have cable, add HBO. Now even the prestige of HBO seems a little more niche – a Game of Thrones spin-off; a well-liked Green Lantern show – than in the past.
There’s also a strange sense that this scramble of greed isn’t paying off as well as it should; many streaming services feel like they’re in far more precarious financial positions than most cable companies or channels were at their peak. It’s a dystopian development: corporations still want consumers on the hook for endless subscription payments, but also seem to want them to share in the nervous stock-checking of a shareholder, without any particular upside. Each month, you check your streaming holdings and see if you’re about to be charged even more, and whether you need to pick one to divest (cancel, whether for good or for now). You can toggle some of them on and off timed to the occasional appearance of a major series like Severance or The Pitt, but the onus for keeping track of erratic streaming schedules is on the subscriber. None of these shows are as necessary as basic groceries. But the ability to relax and watch TV after a long day is still in danger of becoming another budget-related stressor – an unholy combination of cable bloat and the endless doomscroll.
