Cord-cutters escaped the cable bundle only to rebuild it, one streaming subscription at a time. Subscribing to eight major streaming services without ads or bundle discounts now costs $139.41 a month, or $1,672.92 a year, according to a calculation of the platforms’ published U.S. list prices as of Sept. 8, 2026. Choosing each service’s standard, full-catalog ad-supported option wherever one exists brings the bill down to $89.92 a month.
That puts the full ad-free streaming stack within a few dollars of the cable bill many viewers fled from in the first place. In 2016, the average pay-TV bill reached $103.10 a month, according to Leichtman Research Group data. Based on the Consumer Price Index, that 2016 bill would equal approximately $143 in July 2026—only about $4 more than today’s $139.41 ad-free streaming lineup. Although the products are not identical, the narrow difference helps explain why streaming can still be technically, barely cheaper without feeling like much of a bargain.
The $89.92 ad-supported bill comes with another catch. It is roughly what a comparable lineup of eight services cost without ads four years ago, using historical prices reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Cord-cutting is no longer an automatic way to save money. Streaming still gives households more control than cable, but keeping it affordable now requires constant attention—downgrading plans, pursuing bundles, canceling unused subscriptions or cycling among services.
The calculation includes Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, HBO Max and Prime Video. For the ad-free total, Fortune used each service’s least expensive ad-free monthly plan. For the ad-supported total, it used the standard full-catalog plan wherever one was available. Apple TV has no ad-supported tier, so its full $14.99 price is counted in both totals. Prime Video’s $8.99 standalone subscription includes commercials, while removing them costs an additional $4.99 a month.
How streaming’s original bargain unraveled
No service captures the shift more clearly than Apple TV. It launched at $4.99 a month in November 2019 and now costs $14.99 after Apple raised the price by $2 on Aug. 28. That amounts to a 200% increase in under seven years.
Disney+ follows close behind. It launched in November 2019 at $6.99 without ads, but its ad-free plan reached $18.99 in October 2025—a 172% increase. Its ad-supported tier, which did not exist at launch, now costs $11.99. The changes were part of a broader round of Disney streaming increases.
Hulu’s ad-supported plan rose to $11.99 on Oct. 21, 2025, while HBO Max increased the price of every tier that same day, pushing its Standard ad-free plan to $18.49. Hulu’s $18.99 ad-free plan remained unchanged.
Paramount+ raised its cheapest tier to $8.99 on Jan. 15, 2026, up 50% from the $5.99 charged when its predecessor, CBS All Access, launched in 2014. Its ad-free Premium plan now costs $13.99, up 40% from the $9.99 commercial-free tier CBS All Access introduced in 2016, according to PCMag’s streaming-price tracker.
Netflix raised prices across all three of its U.S. plans on March 26, marking its second increase in 14 months, according to Reuters. Its ad-supported plan climbed to $8.99, Standard rose to $19.99, and Premium reached $26.99. Netflix’s cheapest ad-free option now costs 150% more than its $7.99 streaming-only plan did in 2011.
Amazon restructured its offering rather than simply raising the price of a standalone plan, which the company told Fortune it has remained at $8.99 a month for several years. On April 10, it increased the cost of watching Prime Video without ads from $2.99 to $4.99 a month and rebranded the offering as Prime Video Ultra, a separate subscription that also includes 4K UHD, Dolby Atmos, additional downloads and more simultaneous streams. Because Ultra requires an underlying Prime or Prime Video subscription, standalone ad-free Prime Video now costs $13.98 a month. Amazon noted that Prime Video is also included with a $14.99 monthly or $139 annual Prime membership, whose benefits can be shared through Amazon family.
Peacock followed with another round of increases on Aug. 18. Its ad-supported Premium plan rose from $10.99 to $12.99, while Premium Plus increased from $16.99 to $19.99, according to Peacock’s price-increase notice.
Among the services reviewed, HBO Max’s base ad-free price has risen the least in percentage terms. The service debuted at $14.99 a month in May 2020, while its comparable Standard ad-free plan now costs $18.49—an increase of about 23%. HBO Max, however, entered the market at a premium price that many of its rivals have spent the past six years approaching or surpassing.
Collectively, streaming prices rose 11.8% over the past year, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Since 2022, the publication found, streaming prices have increased more than three times as fast as inflation, while overall consumer prices have climbed an annual average of 3.84% since 2019.
Higher prices are also arriving after the content boom that encouraged households to accumulate so many subscriptions began to recede. FX chairman John Landgraf—sometimes called the “mayor of television”—coined the term “Peak TV” in 2015 to describe the rapid growth in scripted programming. FX Research counted roughly 600 original scripted series at the industry’s peak in 2022, but that figure fell 14% to 516 in 2023, according to Axios.
A subsequent Stat Significant analysis, published in 2025, argued that streamers have become more selective, favoring proven returning shows and less expensive unscripted programming over a constant supply of risky news series. This doesn’t necessarily mean television has become worse, but that subscribers are paying higher prices after the supply of new scripted programming has contracted from its peak. It also means that even as streaming prices rise, the amount paid per show is also rising — you’re not getting more value for your streaming buck through this lens, and it basically costs just as much as the old cable bundle.
As households pay more for a shrinking pipeline of new scripted shows, the question becomes which services are still worth keeping.
Price alone doesn’t decide what gets cut
The most expensive platforms are not necessarily the first ones subscribers leave.
Netflix had the lowest monthly churn rate among nine premium streaming services tracked by subscription-analytics firm Antenna in May, at 2%, a level it had maintained for the previous year, according to data reported by MediaPost. Antenna calculates monthly churn by dividing cancellations during a given month by the number of subscribers at the end of the previous month.
Disney+ followed at 3% and Hulu at 4%. Paramount+, Apple TV, Discovery+ and HBO Max each recorded 5%, while Peacock reached 7%. Although Netflix and Paramount+ carried the same $8.99 entry price, Paramount+’s overall churn rate was more than twice as high—another indication that a platform’s price alone does not determine whether subscribers keep it.
Search behavior presents a different picture. Search-marketing firm Searchbloom compared U.S. search demand for joining and canceling seven major streaming services using search-volume estimates from SEO analytics platform Ahrefs, retrieved Sept. 1. Paramount+ had the highest share of cancellation interest at 17.9%, followed by Apple TV at 17.5% and Disney+ at 17.3%.
“People cancel the app they stopped opening,” Cody C. Jensen, CEO and founder of Searchbloom, said in the study’s accompanying statement. “Price only decides how long they wait to notice.”
Searchbloom’s ranking diverges from Antenna’s data on HBO Max, which recorded the same 5% monthly churn rate as Paramount+ in May despite drawing the lowest share of cancellation searches. That difference illustrates the limits of search data because looking for an exit and actually canceling are not the same thing. Someone who searches for instructions may ultimately keep paying, while a subscriber who cancels directly through an app would not appear in Searchbloom’s data.
Keeping streaming cheaper than cable increasingly requires viewers to decide which subscriptions are worth keeping regularly. One tactic is “streaming cycling,” or subscribing to a platform long enough to watch its most desirable shows, canceling and moving on to another. CNET estimates that rotating subscriptions could save a household hundreds of dollars a year.
Streaming still gives viewers the freedom to choose what they pay for. The catch is that cord-cutting used to be a one-time decision. Now it is a monthly one.
Netflix, Apple, and Disney did not respond to requests for comment.