Google raised the price of its family YouTube Premium subscription. The privilege of ad-free watching, background playback and offline watching for you and up to five other people will now set you back an extra $5/month.
- What’s happenning? Google has raised the monthly fee for YouTube Premium’s family plan by five bucks, going from $18 to $23 per month.
- Why care? If you and your family use this plan, the privilege of watching YouTube without ads is now going to cost you $5/month more.
- What to do? Vent your frustration on Google’s support page, but don’t count on hearing back from the company. “You will not receive a response,” Google warns.
YouTube Premium’s family plan is now $5 more per month
New subscribers can no longer subscribe to YouTube Premium’s family plan for $18/month, a major 25 percent price hike. 9to5Google reported that the price change for new subscribers is already live in the United States and other countries:
United States: USD$17.99 → $22.99
Canada: CA$17.99 → CA$22.99
United Kingdom: £17.99 -> £19.99
Argentina: ARS 179 → ARS 699
Japan: ¥1,780 → ¥2,280
More expensive YouTube Premium for families will also soon hit subscribers in Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey, YouTube confirmed in an email to The Verge:
We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we realize how hard this may be for our members. This new price reflects the complete value of YouTube Premium and will allow us to develop even more Premium features and continue to support the creators and artists our members watch and listen to on YouTube.
The family YouTube Premium subscription permits the main user and up to five other people to watch YouTube videos without being interrupted by ads, download videos for offline watching and play a video in the background.
Avoid subscribing via the mobile app
Current subscribers will see the price increase on their next billing cycle starting on or after November 21, 2022, according to an email YouTube sent to subscribers.
The 25 percent increase of the subscription price is even higher if you subscribe to in the mobile app on your iPhone via Apple’s familiar in-app purchasing feature. In that case, you’ll be charged $30/moth because Apple takes a cut of all App Store sales. Read: How to request a refund from Apple for apps, media and subscriptions
If you originally subscribed to YouTube Red’s family plan or were grandfathered in at a lower price as a former Google Play Music subscriber, you won’t be getting the higher price until April 2023, Google confirmed in the email.
YouTube Premium for individual accounts still $12/month
So if the cost of the family plan has increased substantially, can we expect the cost of the Premium plan for individual accounts to increase soon? Well, that remains to be seen but we’ll be disappointed if it does. At post time, YouTube Premium for individual accounts stayed at $12/month. Read: How to not overpay for YouTube Premium
For what it’s worth, Google has indeed increased the cost of the individual YouTube Premium subscription in two countries. In Argentina, the individual YouTube Premium subscription has gone up pretty heavily from ARS 119 to ARS 389. And in Brazil, individual accounts are now being charged TRY 29.99 instead of TRY 16.99.
This is the first major price hike for YouTube Premium, but it may not be the last because Google has been trying to squeeze more revenue from those eyeballs.
A recent YouTube experiment put 4K streaming behind a paywall, requiring a Premium subscription to watch clips in 4K. Google would’t share how many people participated in the test, its learnings from the experiment or which percentage of test users actually subscribed to Premium to gain support for 4K resolution videos.