What happened
Netflix’s ad-free Standard plan launched at $7.99 in September 2011, when streaming was split off from the DVD-by-mail business. It now costs $19.99. That is a 150% increase over fifteen years, and it happened in eight separate steps — no single one of them large enough to make anybody cancel.
The pattern held remarkably steady for a decade: one dollar, every eighteen months or so. 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020. The 2014 increase came with a detail worth remembering — new members paid $8.99 while existing ones stayed at $7.99 for two more years. Grandfathering buys quiet, and it delays the moment when a subscriber notices what the service actually costs now.
Then the rhythm broke. January 2025 added $2.50 in one go, the largest single jump in the plan’s history. Fourteen months later, in March 2026, another $2.00 took it to $19.99.
Why
The dollar-a-year era was funded by subscriber growth: more members paying roughly the same price. When growth in mature markets flattened, revenue had to come from the existing base instead. The password-sharing crackdown of 2023 was the same strategy by another route — convert an existing viewer into a paying account.
The ad-supported tier is the other half of the plan. Every increase on the ad-free plan widens the gap and makes the cheaper, ad-carrying option look more reasonable. The ad tier is not a discount; it is the destination.
What you can do instead
A media server you run yourself has no renewal date. The files are yours, the interface is yours, and the price does not move.