Your basic Netflix subscription disappears here and there, and now?

If you now subscribe to Netflix in the Netherlands or Belgium, you have the following options: for Basic you pay €7.99 and €8.99 respectively, while Standard costs €11.99 and €13.49. Premium has a price of 15.99 and 17.99 €. And do you want someone Add to Standard or Premium Then it will cost you an additional €3.99. In countries like Canada, and now also in the United Kingdom and the United States, things work a little differently. This is where the basic subscription disappears, so that the cheaper option actually disappears.

There is no basic Netflix subscription

At least, this is only partly true. The cheapest ad-free plan is gone, but there’s still an affordable option. If you want to pay as little as possible for content in one of the three countries mentioned, you pay 6 Canadian dollars, 7 US dollars, or five British pounds per month. In the meantime, you will also be presented with advertisements, which is a reason for many people to say goodbye to the popular service.

If you decide to go for this show, you need to keep in mind that you will see about four minutes of commercials per hour. It lasts about fifteen to thirty seconds and cannot be skipped. Admittedly, this is much less intrusive than YouTube, where you’re presented with an ad every three minutes. But even then it is very annoying when you just want to enjoy an evening or a party film want to watch. Also, the new subscription doesn’t even include access to the full library – and you won’t see what you’re missing until it’s too late.

People in Canada, the UK and the US who have a basic plan can keep this package for now. You lose the right to use this subscription only when you cancel the service or want to change the type of subscription.

But as a new customer, you can no longer select the basic subscription. If you want to keep an eye on your expenses and therefore don’t want to spend too much on all the different video streaming services, then you are instantly stuck with the advertising model. If you want to get rid of that, you have to pay roughly three times each month.

testing phase

At the time of this writing, this is still testing and nothing has been set in stone. But if the test proves successful, Netflix will roll it out all over the world. How the company measures new sign-up success isn’t entirely clear. The service does not comment on it. However, we can imagine that if enough people continue to use the subscription for a long time and new users continue to join, Netflix may decide to accept users for this model. Then there is a good chance that this subscription model will also come to the Netherlands and Belgium.

The new ad-supported subscription is already available in other countries, such as Australia, Japan and Korea, but users still have the normal basic subscription option. At the beginning of June 2023, Netflix already had about five million people with this advertising subscription on its books. The company is expected to generate €1.73 billion in advertising revenue in 2024; So there is still a lot to achieve. The big question now is whether the basic subscription will disappear everywhere. We consider the possibility very reasonable.