Good news is, you don’t have to. With a little bit of streaming savviness, you can watch all the shows and movies you want without bleeding out your bank account each month.
Unsubscribe, resubscribe
Most streaming services let you subscribe by the month, which means if you’ve watched just about everything you want to watch on Netflix, you can take a break until the latest season of Stranger Things ends or the next season of Black Mirror appears on the platform. Of course you’ll need to be on top of when your subscription dates are coming up, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. You can check your next billing date on Netflix by visiting this page, for example, and take a pause in your Netflix subscription by clicking Cancel Membership. If you’re worried about forgetting, it’s a good idea to set reminders on your calendar so you can cancel your accounts on time. It’s in the best interests of the streaming services to keep the cancelling process relatively painless as well. They’d rather you signed up for six months than none at all, and having month-by-month subscriptions is one way they can encourage users to keep checking them out.
Get together with your family
Family plans aren’t as common with video streaming services as they are with music streaming services, but you can still save some money by getting together with family or friends and sharing accounts. Please know we’re talking legitimate sharing, here—we don’t recommend you break a platform’s terms and conditions by sharing logins with a wider group of people. With Netflix, if you have an individual or basic plan, you can pay an additional $10 per month to watch on a total of 4 screens. Having more people chip in to the monthly subscription reduces the price-per-person overall, so in this example, you and your friends will pay $5 each instead of $9.99—the price for individual accounts. And just in case you were wondering, Netflix supports multiple users on the same account, so your recommendations won’t get ruined by someone else’s questionable taste in movies. . Different services have different rules so make sure to dig into the various options available to make sure you’re on the best deal. Be on the lookout for special offers and bundles as well: once upon a time, a Spotify Premium account came with a free Hulu subscription, for instance.
Buy, don’t subscribe
And don’t forget the tip we just mentioned about sharing the cost—maybe you don’t want to bill your kids for every movie they watch, but if you’ve got a partner or a few friends around who can chip in, you might only pay a dollar to watch something. Television shows remain on the expensive side compared to streaming packages, with something like Parks and Recreation costing as much as $35 at the time of writing. Remember though, buying your favorite show does guard against it getting yanked from your streaming platforms, and gives you lifetime access to it. If you’re thinking about buying a show you’ll probably rewatch, maybe it’s worth the investment. If not, perhaps you’re better off paying for a subscription. Just consider that if it’s a show like Mad Men—seven seasons of long, dense episodes—it will probably take you longer than a month to finish it, which means another month paying for the service streaming it.
