Your streaming bill did not go up this spring. Neither did your sister's, or your parents'. After three solid years of increase notices arriving like utility statements, the quiet feels like somebody finally blinked. It isn't that. The money just stopped moving through the part of the bill you actually look at.
Streaming price increases have slowed sharply since 2023. That is not competition working. Streamers shifted revenue to advertising and extra-member fees, and the widening gap between ad-free and ad-supported plans now carries the increase your monthly statement no longer shows.
Why It Matters
Ampere Analysis published a three-year pricing dataset in August 2026 covering Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon, and the headline holds up: the average annual price increase fell from 24% in 2023/24 to 14% in 2025/26. Two years, and the size of the ask nearly halved.
The obvious read is that competition finally worked. Or rather, that's the read most of the coverage settled on, and it's the one I'd argue is wrong. Nothing about this market got more competitive between 2023 and 2026. What changed is that households started cancelling, and a cancellation is worth far less to a streamer than a downgrade. So the industry built a downgrade worth having and made it the cheap answer to a question it asks you at checkout. Same logic as how your own data quietly sets the price you see: the price stops being a number on a rate card and becomes a function of what you will tolerate.
Watch where the growth actually went. Advertising is no longer a side experiment at these companies; it is the reason the subscription line can afford to sit still. Ad inventory scales with viewing hours rather than billing events, so a household that downgrades and watches more is worth more than one that pays more and watches less. Subscription pricing was a blunt instrument. Advertising is a meter. Charging for extra member slots after the password-sharing crackdown adds a second meter, pointed at people who were already inside the account. Anyone who has watched hardware you already paid for turn into a subscription will recognise the shape of it.
Four numbers make the shift legible: how long the trend has been running, what the ad-free choice now costs you above the ad plan, how many people took the other option, and how fast they are still taking it.
Tracking Window
3 Years
August 2023 to July 2026
Ad-Free Premium
$11 / mo
Netflix US, was $8.50
Ad Tier Reach
250M
Monthly active viewers
Sign-Up Share
60%
Choose ads where offered
The sign-up share is the one worth sitting with. When a clear majority of new customers pick the advertising plan, the ad-free tier stops being the default product and becomes an upsell, and upsells get priced against willingness to pay rather than cost to serve. The ad-free price never has to rise for that premium to widen. The ad price only has to stay low.
Prices stopped climbing because you stopped paying. That is not restraint from the streamers, it is the sound of a ceiling being found, and the money simply moved somewhere your statement does not itemise.
What The Three-Year Data Actually Shows
The service-level breakdown is where the averages get interesting, because the three big platforms did not decelerate the same way or for the same reason. Netflix held its percentage discipline while still taking the biggest dollars per increase. The hardest braking came from Disney+. And Amazon's rises stayed small in cash terms while running enormous in proportion, which is what happens when the base price is low to begin with.
| Category | Detail | Insight |
|---|---|---|
| Dollar Size | Average increase fell from $1.67 to $1.54 per event | Smaller ask, same annual arrival pattern |
| Tier Gap | Ad-free to ad-supported spread widened from $4.53 to $5.35 | Premium grew while headline prices stalled |
| Netflix | $1.73 average rise, 16% of the prior price | Biggest dollars, tightest percentage of the three |
| Disney+ | 31% of prior price in 2023/24, down to 13% in 2025/26 | Steepest deceleration of any service tracked |
| Amazon | $1.47 average rise, but 30% of the prior price | Lowest base inflates fastest in percentage terms |
| Region | North America $1.70 (15%), Western Europe $1.86 (16%) | European subscribers absorb more per increase event |
| Ad Revenue | Netflix advertising tracking near $3 billion during 2026 | Roughly double the previous year's total |
| Your Math | Annualised, the US ad-free premium runs about $132 a year | Weigh that against your monthly watch hours |
Read down the Detail column and the pattern separates cleanly from the headline. Every one of those service-level numbers describes a slowing rate of increase on the plan price. Not one of them describes the thing that grew, which is the distance between the two plans a subscriber is asked to choose from. That distance is the product now.
Across three years of tracked increases, ad-free plans absorbed roughly a third more per increase than ad-supported plans did, which is the mechanical reason the gap between the two keeps opening even in years when neither headline price moves much.
Friction Points
Jaanika Juntson, a senior research manager at Ampere Analysis, described the mechanism plainly when the data landed: advertising has become an increasingly important revenue stream that reduces reliance on subscription pricing alone, while password-sharing crackdowns let streamers generate more value from the audience they already have through extra member slots. Read that twice. Nothing in it is about giving anybody a better deal.
Here is the part nobody has measured, and I will flag it as my read rather than a finding: ad load on these tiers is not contractually fixed. A plan carrying four minutes an hour today can carry seven in eighteen months with no price change, no notification email, and nothing a comparison site would register as an increase. My expectation is that a good share of the next few years of margin comes from exactly there. The pace is a guess. The direction isn't.
The broader move should look familiar by now. Microsoft's paid extended security updates for Windows 10 took something that used to be included and put a price on it. Streaming is running the same play backwards: hold the price still, and quietly reduce what it buys.
- Check the ad-free premium on your own account rather than the headline plan price. The gap is where the increase now lives.
- An annual plan locks the price. It does not lock the ad load or the stream quality tier that price buys.
- Extra member slots bill and renew separately from the main plan, which makes them easy to forget and easy to keep charging.
- Retention offers surface at cancellation, not at renewal. The cheaper tier is usually available months before anyone shows it to you.
Key Takeaways
Across the full three years the average increase was $1.60, about 17% of whatever the plan cost before it. Slower is not the same as small.
Central and Eastern European subscribers absorbed $1.68 per increase, 18% of the prior price, the steepest proportion of any region tracked.
The number to audit on your own account is the ad-free premium, not the plan price. That is the line that actually moved.
Open your account settings tonight and find what ad-free costs you above the ad plan. If that gap is larger than you would have accepted as a straight price rise, you already took the increase. You just took it as a choice, which is the whole point of structuring it that way. Downgrade or don't, but price it honestly first.
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