5 Ways To Save Money As Streaming Gets More Expensive

The price gap between watching with and without ads is becoming hard to ignore.

The cheapest monthly subscription to Netflix without commercials now costs $15.49 in the United States. (Netflix is killing a $9.99 option.) But if you’re okay sitting through commercials, you’ll pay $6.99 a month.

Disney said last week that it’s raising the monthly price of Hulu without commercials to $17.99 from $14.99 starting in October. But the cost of the subscription option with commercials is staying at $7.99 a month in the United States.

Peacock, Max (formerly HBO Max), Disney Plus and Paramount Plus (which includes Showtime) also have subscription tiers with commercials. In some cases, they are half the cost of options without ads.

Michele Rousseau in Las Vegas emailed me a detailed rundown of how she paid just $101.82 for seven streaming services for all or parts of 2022 and this year.

With an American Express card, she took advantage of several offers to spend, for example, $4.99 on a Peacock subscription and get the equivalent amount in card credit.

Rousseau applied for that card credit offer multiple times and did something similar for a Disney Plus subscription.

She pounced on several Hulu sales at $1 or $1.99 a month and found a deal for Max at $69.99 a year. Rousseau also tacked on a $14 cash-back offer from the Rakuten coupon service.

Not all of us are savings pros like Rousseau, but it’s smart to hunt for discounts before you click subscribe.

Many credit cards have cash-back or statement credit options that you can find on their websites. And if you download an add-on to your browser from Rakuten, it will pop up notifications for cash-back offers available when you’re on streaming services’ sites.

Be careful. You don’t want to buy something you don’t really want just because it’s on sale.

Verizon recently started offering some mobile phone customers a discount on combined subscriptions to Netflix and Paramount Plus with Showtime for $25.99 a month. The subscriptions separately cost about $32, Vulture reported.

T-Mobile and AT&T also throw in streaming subscriptions such as Netflix or Apple TV Plus with some mobile phone plans. (Vulture made a handy list.)

If you buy a new iPhone or some other Apple products, the company adds three months free of Apple TV Plus.

It’s helpful to understand the business strategy behind these deals.

Mobile companies — like many news organizations and streaming providers — figure you’re less likely to quit if you get two, three or four services from the same company.

You can use this corporate motivation to your advantage. But read the fine print for catches.

With the Hollywood strikes stopping the production of many new shows, streaming services might not have as much stuff to keep you entertained month after month.

You could be better off subscribing to one streaming service for a while, watching what’s interesting to you and canceling. Then repeat with another streaming service.

You can always come back and subscribe again.

Netflix says it saves your account details and watch lists for 10 months if you want to cancel and return.

Other services including Hulu give you the choice to “pause,” which saves your shows and settings for something like a month or three.

Set a calendar reminder to cancel before the pause expires if you decide you want to cancel.

I keep browser bookmarks of shows I want to watch, organized by the streaming service they’re on, and rotate among the streaming services.

I subscribed to Hulu until I got bored with the stuff to watch, canceled and recently started a new subscription to Netflix.

(Tell me how you find the entertainment you want to watch and keep track of it all.)

Read more: How to pause and cancel your accounts to juggle streaming services

You won’t find the latest hot series or movies, but there are mammoth collections of mostly older entertainment on free streaming services such as Pluto TV, Amazon’s Freevee, Tubi and the Roku Channel.

(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)

YouTube has free movies, mostly with ads.

And if there’s a particular movie or TV series you want to watch, you might not need a streaming subscription.

Search on JustWatch.com to check, for example, where you can download a digital rental for “Avatar: The Way of Water” from sites like Apple TV, Amazon or YouTube.

If your public library uses Hoopla, you can access some TV series, movies and streaming education services like the Great Courses. The options vary by library system.

My colleague Heather Kelly, a price-saving genius, loves telling anyone within earshot to avoid the “premium” subscription to Netflix that costs $19.99 a month.

The main feature of the premium Netflix subscription is the ability to watch Netflix simultaneously on four different devices.

(The default no-commercial subscription tier at $15.49 a month lets you watch on two different devices at the same time.)

Heather’s view is that unless you live in a mansion, you don’t need this fancy version of Netflix.

If you’re sharing with your family (or others), maybe it makes sense to get the pricier subscription.

But ask yourself how often your household needs to have three or four people watching different Netflix programming at once.

Max also has a similar luxury subscription plan at $19.99 a month.

Let’s call this a bonus sixth tip for this new stingy streaming era: Be wary of paying for what you don’t really need.

Streaming prices will probably only go up from here. You want to keep questioning your personal cost-benefit analysis.