Netflix may be about to end your cheap subscription

Still on a Netflix Basic plan? You won’t be soon, by the sound of it.

In a letter to its shareholders, Netflix suggested it is moving to its next stage of booting out its old Basic plan.

“The phasing out of our Basic plan in the UK and Canada, which we will now start in the US and France — has increased our ads member base by 34% sequentially in Q2,” says Netflix.

It’s a bit of a disappointment if you don’t want to pay too much for your Netflix sub, but also can’t stand ads interfering with your viewing.

Basic gets you limited 720p resolution streams, not even Full HD, but these can still look decent.

Netflix announced it was canning this tier in July 2023. This was for new subscribers. Existing ones could stay on that plan. But not for much longer.

We heard earlier this month that Basic Netflix subscribers were receiving a warning to choose a new plan in order to continue watching. If you haven't seen that, you may well do soon.

What are those other plans? Folks wanting to continue spending less will have to put up with ads.

Netflix’s ad-supported plan costs $6.99, or £4.99 in the UK, has provided Full HD streams.

The Standard plan costs $15.49 (£10.99 in the UK), which gets you 1080p streams and no ads.

For the best experience you’ll pay $22.99 (£17.99) a month, which unlocks 4K streams and four concurrent streams, up from two on the lower-end plans.

What does this tell us? Netflix clearly makes a decent amount of money from its most recent ad-supported tier.

It’s hoping for a 14-15% jump in revenue over 2024 once the year is done. And that makes a lot of sense for us folks looking at how much more we end up paying for Netflix than we used to.

It had better keep the good stuff rolling in. Recent additions include the sixth season of Cobra Kai and an unlikely adaptation of Expoding Kittens, a silly party game.

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