Key Takeaways
- Disney is increasing the price of its Premium plan on Disney+ from $10.99 to $13.99 per month starting on October 12, 2023.
- However, customers can avoid the price increase by gifting themselves a subscription for a year at the current price of $110.
- Disney is also raising the prices of Hulu’s ad-free plan from $14.99 to $17.99 per month and ESPN+ from $9.99 to $10.99 per month. The ad-supported plan for Disney+ will be expanded to Canada, the UK, and parts of Europe. Disney may also crack down on password sharing in the future.
Disney is about to perform a pretty major reshuffle of how its pricing works, making things predictably more expensive and spreading its ad-supported plan to a whole bunch more countries.
In terms of pricing changes, Disney+‘s Premium plan will be going up from $10.99 to $13.99 each month, meaning a pretty big change to the annual cost of a subscription at $139.99.
However, the price change will only come into effect on 12 October 2023, so there’s some wiggle room until then. The biggest workaround is the continued option of gift subscriptions, which can lock in a 12-month membership for a Premium plan without ads at the current price ($110 or £79.90).
Disney+
You can gift a subscription to a year, meaning you’ll avoid the price rise for at least 10 months.
There are a couple of caveats to this, and the biggest is that you can’t add a gift subscription to an existing account – you’ll need a new email address or account to use it on.
That’s hardly insurmountable, though, so this is a really good way to insulate yourself from the price rise for at least a year.
More pricing changes
Meanwhile, Disney is also doing some adjustments to how it prices Hulu and ESPN+, with Hulu’s ad-free plan going from $14.99 to $17.99 a month and ESPN+ going from $9.99 to $10.99.
There are still various bundle deals to soften this blow, but if you only want a single service, in 4K and without ads, things are getting tighter for sure.
Finally, Disney is also rolling out its ad-supported plan for Disney+ a lot more widely – it added this option for US viewers in late 2022, and the price isn’t changing for those people.
However, the plan will now roll out to Canada, the UK and parts of Europe to bring a bit more standardisation to how it operates around the world.
Ominously, on the earnings call in which this was all annouced, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed that Disney will be looking to crack down on password sharing in the near future.
That’s doubtless after the success of Netflix’s recent push to stop people sharing passwords as widely, although there are no concrete announcements on what it might look like.
