YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:

March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.

Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.

Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.

One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.

Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.

The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.

Data is CC BY 4.0: https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv

Method: https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/

Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.

Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.

In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).

It is way cheaper long term.

"nine streaming subscriptions".

No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.

Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.

Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.

Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.

To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.

From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.

Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.

98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.

Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "

I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.

1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.

2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).

With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.

Is that number really correct?

It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to

$1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56)

It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.

* They increased the cost of all price tiers.

* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.

* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.

This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.

You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...

No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.

Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).

I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.

Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.