Your Monthly Netflix Subscription Is About to Become a Little More Expensive

With more than 200 million subscribers worldwide, Netflix is easily winning the streaming wars. But as The A.V. Club notes, when you have just about as many customers as you can possibly get, how do you keep showing your shareholders the growth they’re so obsessed with? One option: Raise your prices.

That’s what Netflix will be doing in the U.S. and Canada over the coming months, raising monthly subscription prices by $1 or $2, depending on the subscriber's current tier. Here’s how it breaks down:

• Netflix Premium (4K content, four screens at once): $18 to $20 per month
• Netflix Standard (HD content, two screens at once): $14 to $15.50 per month
• Netflix Basic (no HD content, one screen at a time): $9 to $10 per month

Netflix prices vs. other streaming services

For reference, here’s how the other major players in the streaming wars are priced out right now:

• Apple TV+: $5 per month
• Disney+: $8 per month
• Paramount+: $10 per month
• Hulu: $13 per month
• HBO Max: $15 per month

(Hulu and HBO Max also offer ad-supported plans for less money.)

So the standard Netflix plan is now on par with HBO Max, which has always been the priciest of the streaming services. Although the original goal of so-called "cord-cutting" was to make it so people could save money on cable subscriptions, if price creep continues like this, there may not be much difference.