What you need to know
- YouTube Premium prices in the US are increasing across individual, family, and student plans starting next month.
- The individual plan is rising to $15.99/month, while the family plan is jumping to $26.99/month.
- The price hike comes as YouTube shows more ads to free users and cracks down on ad blockers.
Google has started informing YouTube Premium subscribers in the U.S. that it’s increasing subscription prices starting next month, and the change isn’t exactly small.
Multiple reports on Reddit (via Piunikaweb) suggest users have begun receiving official emails from Google about the price hike. In these emails, Google highlights the benefits of YouTube Premium, like ad-free viewing, background playback, and offline downloads, before confirming that the new pricing will come into effect next month.
According to these reports, the individual plan is going up from $13.99 to $15.99 per month. The annual plan is also increasing from $139.99 to $159.99. Family plans are seeing a bigger jump, going from $22.99/month to $26.99/month, while the student plan is increasing from $7.99 to $8.99 per month.
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Nope not happening. Just cancelled my premium, already expensive enough. Multi-billion dollar company acting like they are going broke or something. from r/youtube
Interestingly, YouTube hasn’t made any formal announcement through a press release yet. Instead, it has quietly started notifying users via email, and it hasn’t clearly explained why the prices are going up this time around.
The last price increase came in July 2023, when the individual plan moved from $11.99 to $13.99 per month. This latest bump follows a similar $2 increase pattern, now taking it to $15.99 per month.
What makes this more noticeable is the timing. Over the past few months, YouTube has been more aggressive with ads for non-paying users and has also been cracking down on ad blockers. And now, even paying subscribers are seeing a price increase without much warning, which might not sit well with a lot of users.
Android Central’s Take
Another price hike, and this one feels harder to justify. YouTube Premium is great — it’s in fact a service that I happily pay for — but it’s slowly creeping into “too expensive for what it offers” territory. Hoping Google adds more meaningful features to justify the increase (and not just things like the Ask Videos feature).
