Summary
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 serviceraising 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
Many of Them Have Hidden Customer Retention Systems
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
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.
