You may or may not have noticed, but streaming price rises have been getting smaller lately, and after three years of consistently watching bills climb, it’s tempting to feel like that’s a win. However, analysts have revealed that, while the average increase fell from 24% in 2023/24 to 14% in 2025/26 across Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon, those same companies found other routes into your wallet.
None of these new methods enlisted by the streamers feel as bad as a price rise upfront, but what they have done is dilute and diminish the value of our existing subscriptions.
According to research from Ampere Analysis, the average individual price increase has fallen from $1.67 to $1.54 over that same period, with Disney+ making the biggest move by dropping its average increases from 31% to 13%. Netflix has stayed broadly stable, meanwhile, and Amazon has actually made the fewest increases of the trio. Note that Ampere puts this down partly to Prime Video being part of a much larger proposition with Amazon Prime.
So, the slowdown is genuine, but the decline may not be the good news it appears. Ampere’s Senior research manager, Jaanika Juntson, actually puts it down to streamers diversifying how they monetize their audience (i.e., you and me), from advertising to more and more subscription tiers, and from what we’ve seen, it’s hard not to agree.
The gap between the ad and ad-free tiers
The gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening
For three-ish years, ad-free tiers have largely absorbed the average increase of $1.62, while ad-supported plans have seen $1.21, which means that the two ends of the membership equation are further away from each other than ever, entirely on purpose. Around the world, the average difference between ad-free and ad-supported went from $4.53 in the year to July 2024 to $5.35 in the year to July 2026.
That’s globally, mind you, and the picture for the US is much starker. The gap between Netflix’s Standard with Ads plan and its ad-free Standard tier, for example, went from $8.50 in August 2023 to $11 by July 2026, largely bolstered by the March ’26 increase that moved Standard with Ads to $8.99, Standard to $19.99, and Premium to $26.99.
The pattern anyone can see is that the cheapest tier always stays cheap, and it’s the expensive options that climb up in cost. That makes a lot of sense, since the more tiers that exist, the more features that can be sold back to you.
Ampere expects ad-supported tiers to make up 54% of North American subscription revenue by the end of 2026, and advertising alone is predicted to pass $18 billion. That’s more than half of North American subscription revenue for the streamers being taken from the cheap tier, so it has to stay attractive to consumers, or they’re in big trouble.
Amazon taught us nothing is for keeps
Prime Video Ultra lowered resolutions while keeping prices the same
In April this year, Amazon rebranded its cheap $2.99 ad-free Prime Video add-on, creating in its place Prime Video Ultra – $4.99 a month, and required for 4K UHD and Dolby Atmos. If you don’t have this upgrade, then your image tops out at 1080p, and existing subscribers weren’t grandfathered in like you might expect.
It wasn’t all bad news, as Amazon did add Dolby Vision to the base tier along with the HDR10 and HDR10+ that were already present, and subscribers could get more concurrent streams and downloads for their money. But still, a subscription that costs the same but gives you less overall has, in all the ways that matter, gone up.
Sharing accounts is now a no-no
Yet enforcement is still a work in progress
Another route into our pockets for the streamers has been the crackdown on account sharing, with Netflix introducing extra-member slots as add-ons where they used to be free. In March, these rose to $7.99 a month with ads and $9.99 without, and Standard with Ads subscribers don’t get the option at all.
Similarly, HBO Max charges $7.99 for its extra member add-ons, enforcing against multi-household sharing in the US since August 2025, and Warner Bros. Discovery has confirmed that a global rollout is in the plans for this year. Disney+ sits in the same range, at around $7 on its ad tier and $10 on Premium.
You may argue that this is at least honest and transparent pricing, but as our own tracking of the crackdown found, services like Peacock and Paramount+ both specify an anti-sharing policy but have done pretty much nothing to enforce it. The streamers want you to be nervous, but the picture for families who are sharing one account isn’t as gloomy as it’s been made out to be.
Are any of these costs still worth it?
On paper, maybe, for now
Ampere’s own interpretation of these trends is that streamers are rapidly approaching the upper limits of what people are willing to pay for their entertainment, and the deceleration of price increases is a result of that. Faced with rising household costs across the board, subscribers have suddenly become more likely to cancel, trade down, or generally push back when a Netflix or Disney+ subscription suddenly goes up for the third time in a year.
A word of warning, though, comes from the other side of the pond. Netflix has just raised prices again in the UK, with the ad-supported plan going up 33.4%, from £5.99 to £7.99 (around $10.81), and the ad-free Standard tier rising 7.7%. So that’s the cheapest ad-supported tier rising by the largest percentage, which argues against the logic companies have displayed up until now.
Doing the math, a household on Netflix Standard with one extra member for a parent living across town, plus Prime Video with Ultra added back for the 4K, translates to $34.97 a month, of which $14.98 is buying back things that were either included or free two years ago.
The hikes are really shrinking, but that’s in no way the full picture. It’s time for all of us to audit our subscriptions, since what we may have assumed is still included (e.g. 4K or Atmos), may have grown a price tag since we last checked. It’s also true that some of the cheaper services end up holding their value better than those from bigger companies, but there’s an argument that the premium tiers were never worth the money for most of us anyway.
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- Subscription with ads
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$9
- Premium Subscription
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$20 or $26 options
- Simultaneous streams
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2-4
- # of profiles
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5
- Originals
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Yes
- Live TV
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No
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- Simultaneous streams
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3
- # of profiles
-
6
- Originals
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Yes
- Live TV
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Limited (some add-on channels offer live TV)
- Price
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$8.99 per month by itself or $14.99 per month as a part of Prime
Amazon Prime Video is the commerce giant’s contribution to the streaming world. Featuring movies and TV shows across a variety of genres as well as its own original content, there’s always something to watch.
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- number of users
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2-4
- Subscription with ads
-
$11.99/month
- Premium Subscription
-
$18.99/month
- # of profiles
-
6+
- Originals
-
Yes
- Live TV
-
No
Disney+ is a popular streaming service that Disney launched in November 2019.
