Nine streaming subscriptions cost $702 more per year than in 2021, every price hike sourced

What the tracker found

A price-tracking guide from HonestlyRanked, which reached Hacker News's front page this week, tallies the flagship tiers of nine major streaming services in the US and finds they now cost $154.41 a month combined. In March 2021, according to the guide, the same nine services cost $95.91 a month. That is a 61% increase over roughly five years — $702 more per year — for exactly the same basket of services and, in most cases, the same tiers. Nothing was cancelled or downgraded to produce the figure.

The nine services tracked are Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium and Spotify, all measured at US list prices.

The per-service numbers

According to HonestlyRanked's dated record, the changes between March 2021 and the guide's September 2026 update break down as follows:

• Apple TV+: $4.99 to $14.99, up 200%
• Disney+ Premium (ad-free): $7.99 to $18.99, up 138%
• Peacock Premium Plus (ad-free): $9.99 to $19.99, up 100%
• Hulu No Ads: $11.99 to $18.99, up 58%
• Netflix Standard: $13.99 to $19.99, up 43%
• Paramount+ Premium: $9.99 to $13.99, up 40%
• YouTube Premium Individual: $11.99 to $15.99, up 33%
• Spotify Premium Individual: $9.99 to $12.99, up 30%
• HBO Max Standard (ad-free): $14.99 to $18.49, up 23%

On an annual basis, the guide puts the same nine subscriptions at $1,150.92 a year at March 2021 prices versus $1,852.92 today — the $702 difference at the centre of the story.

How the basket is built

The methodology choices are what make the comparison defensible. March 2021 is used as the baseline because it is the first month in which all nine services existed simultaneously; the guide argues that summing launch prices instead would describe a basket no consumer could ever have bought, since those launches fall in different years.

YouTube TV and Prime Video are excluded from the basket — the former is a live-TV bundle, the latter a membership add-on — but both remain tracked in the site's broader price-increase log. Every figure on the page is dated and linked to its original source, and according to the site's methodology notes the numbers are pulled from a tracking database at page-build time and re-checked daily. The guide is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence, and its author writes under a pen name, Rashid N.

The pattern behind the numbers

The guide explicitly declines to speculate on why prices keep rising, limiting itself to what was charged and when. What the dated record does show, it says, is that price increases have become regular rather than exceptional, with several services raising prices more than once within a single year.

It is also worth noting where the steepest climbs sit. Three of the four largest increases in the basket — Disney+, Peacock and Hulu — are ad-free video tiers, measured over a period in which much of the industry introduced cheaper ad-supported plans. HBO Max's ad-free tier and Apple TV+ sit at opposite extremes: the smallest increase in the basket and the largest.

Why it matters

The guide turns a widely felt annoyance into an auditable number. Streaming price hikes tend to land as isolated $1-to-$4 bumps, easy to shrug off individually and hard to tally mentally; a ledger where every change is dated and linked makes the cumulative effect visible and verifiable rather than anecdotal.

For households, the headline figure is a real budget line: $702 a year is roughly the cost of another subscription or two, and the per-service breakdown gives consumers concrete grounds for churn decisions — Spotify's 30% increase over five years reads very differently from Apple TV+'s 200%.

The methodology is a second takeaway. Like-for-like comparisons at a single date, with exclusions stated openly, are how this kind of claim should be built, and the $1,852.92 annual total inevitably invites comparison with the cable bundles these services once positioned themselves as the cheaper alternative to. Whether that trade still favours the streaming stack is now a question consumers can check against sourced numbers rather than marketing.