Key Takeaways
- Subscription prices are rising – services are getting expensive.
- Streaming platforms want to keep subscribers – may offer better deals.
- Canceling subscriptions can lead to better offers – worth trying for savings.
Just like me, you’ve probably got a whole bunch of streaming subscriptions and a mounting bill to keep them all going. The good news is that if you attempt to cancel some of these, you might end up saving money while still retaining your service.
Subscription Prices Keep Crawling Upwards
You’ve probably seen the news about one or another subscription service raising its prices. Many of these services started out by running at a loss and undercutting other services without deep financial reserves. Now that the streaming market is consolidating into just a few big players, the time has come for the second part of the strategy where services get worse and prices go up.
Clearly, this isn’t going to be popular with customers, but where can you go to legally get you content? Especially when a lot of the best content is now owned by these various streaming services. Of course, lots of people rotate their subscriptions and binge original content one service at a time, but for those of us living in households with lots of viewers, it’s usually necessary to keep a few services running in parallel to keep everyone happy. Which means even small increases on a per-service basis can add up fast.
Services Are Desperate to Keep You Paying
Susbcription-based services such as video streaming platforms get much of their valuation from subscriber numbers. In general this means that shareholders want to see those subscriber numbers go up, but if you’re losing existing subscribers there’s little point in getting new ones if the total number stays the same or even drops! So, while every subscription service would like to get every dollar from you they can, they also value their actual subscriber numbers. Which means you have some level of leverage over them.
Many of Them Have Hidden Customer Retention Systems
Lots of subscription services have automated retention systems. At some point during the cancelation process, that system will offer you a better price, or even a few months for free. This isn’t advertised, and whether you’ll get such an offer might be based on something personal, such as how long you’ve been a subscriber or where in the world you are. It might also depend on whether the service in question needs to retain subscribers or not.
Either way, all you have to do is initiate the cancellation process until you’re made an offer. It’s worth doing this at least once for every subscription you have, and it’s definitely worth doing for subscriptions that you’re considering cancelling anyway.
There’s No Harm in Trying to Get a Better Deal
Even if you don’t really want to cancel your service, there’s no real harm in pretending to see if you can’t get a better deal. After all, your data won’t be deleted, you can always immediately resubscribe, and there won’t be any break in your service. That’s because usually your subscription will still run to the end of the current billing period.
The only downside I can think of is if you’re still grandfathered into an older lower price, in which case you should wait until your price actually goes up. Otherwise, when you cancel and try to reactivate your subscription, it will be at the new price.
I recently canceled my MUBI subscription since I had already watched everything I was interested in for the time being, and as you can see above, they made me a heck of a one-time offer. Of course, since I live in South Africa that price is in South African Rands, but that’s a drop from about $8 to $5! So maybe it’s time to call the bluff of your own subscriptions and see if they’ll do something similar. You can even do a little internet sleuthing to see if any of your services are known for doing this.
