When Disney+ launched in November 2019, it cost $6.99 a month and carried no ads. The ad-free version of the same service now costs $21.49, more than triple the original price, after Disney’s latest round of increases took effect this week.
Disney raised prices on nearly every U.S. tier of Disney+ and Hulu on Wednesday, the fourth increase in four years, pushing the ad-free plans past $20 a month and steering customers toward cheaper, ad-supported bundles. Disney+ Premium and Hulu Premium each rose $2.50 to $21.49 a month, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The new structure is deliberate. The ad-free Disney+/Hulu bundle rose $2 to $21.99, while ad-supported standalone plans for each service rose 50 cents to $12.49 and the ad-supported bundle stayed flat at $12.99. A customer who buys Disney+ and Hulu separately now pays $42.98 a month, roughly double the cost of the ad-free bundle. Disney has priced the menu so that the bundle looks like the only sensible choice.
Even at $21.49, Disney+ Premium undercuts Netflix’s top ad-free plan at $26.99 and Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max Premium at $22.99. The increase is larger in percentage terms because Disney’s base was lower: the ad-free tier jumped about 13%.
The pattern has held since the service’s early days. Disney introduced its first ad-supported tier in 2022, and every round of price increases since has widened the gap between the ad-free and ad-supported experiences. Advertising generates revenue per user on top of the subscription fee, and Disney has used pricing to push more households toward the tier that pays twice.
Disney’s streaming growth has been among the industry’s fastest. The company’s combined Disney+ and Hulu subscriber base ranks near the top of the market, behind Netflix, powered by a library that includes Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars. That scale gave Disney room to raise prices steadily without the subscriber exodus that smaller services risk.
The bundles themselves are an answer to a problem Disney created. The company launched Disney+, Hulu and ESPN as separate products and then spent years stitching them together, first with discounts and later with a single app that presents them as one service. Bundling has become the company’s main defense against churn, and the new pricing makes the discount almost impossible to ignore.
The increases come as Disney leans on streaming to offset a softer linear-television business. The company has spent years consolidating Disney+, Hulu and ESPN under one roof and using bundles to reduce churn, the share of subscribers who cancel each month. Analysts said holding the ad-supported bundle flat while raising everything around it is a way to keep price-sensitive households without discounting the premium tiers.
The timing was pointed. The increase landed exactly a year after Disney’s last hike and a day after “Toy Story 5” arrived on the service, giving the company a high-profile title to soften the announcement. New subscribers pay the new rates immediately; existing customers see them on their next billing cycle.
The increases also reached the company’s larger packages. The ad-supported Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle rose $2 to $21.99, the ad-free version rose $3 to $32.99, and the entry plan for Hulu + Live TV now starts at $99.99 a month, up $10.
Disney is not alone in pushing prices higher. Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount have all raised rates in recent years as the streaming industry shifts from acquiring subscribers at any cost to extracting more revenue from the ones it has. The difference is frequency: no major service has raised U.S. prices as often as Disney has over the past four years.
Disney has said its streaming business turned profitable in 2024, earlier than most rivals, and steady price increases are part of how it intends to keep it that way as content costs continue to rise. Movies and series get more expensive to produce, and the company has decided that subscribers, not just advertisers, should absorb more of that cost.
For consumers, the effect is a streaming bill that looks more like a cable bill every year. Households that once paid a single fee for one service now juggle several, each with its own annual increase, and the distance between what streaming promised a decade ago and what it costs today has narrowed considerably.
The strategy carries a short-term trade-off. Each price increase risks pushing some households to cancel, and Disney’s guidance to investors has long included an expectation that some churn will follow. So far, the company has concluded that the revenue gained from higher prices and advertising outweighs the subscribers lost.
The risk is that the same arithmetic that makes the bundle look smart also forces customers to reckon with how much they now pay for entertainment that once cost $6.99. Four increases in four years suggest Disney believes most of them will pay anyway. The next billing cycle will show whether that confidence is justified.
