There’s a silver lining to Netflix’s password sharing crackdown

The days of carefree Netflix password sharing may be over, but the crackdown appears to be coming with a sweetener: a freeze on price hikes, at least in the near term.

Speaking during Netflix’s second-quarter 2023 earnings call on Wednesday, company CFO Spence Neumann said any additional Netflix price hikes are “more than a year out” in major markets, including the US, Variety reports.

Update (10/19/2023): Actually, Netflix just went ahead with price hikes in the US, France, and UK.

Part of the reason Netflix is content to stick with its current plan prices is due to “revenue growth” from “new paid memberships…and that’s largely driven by our paid-sharing rollout,” Neumann said. 

Indeed, Netflix announced Wednesday that it gained a whopping 5.6 million net paid subscribers during the past quarter, while the password-sharing crackdown has resulted in more sign-ups than cancellations, according to Variety.

In other words, the Netflix password-sharing crackdown is working, even if it’s not all that popular with users.

The last big Netflix price hike was back in January 2022, when the streamer raised the price of Netflix’s 4K Premium plan to $19.99 a month, a $2-a-month increase, while Standard plans went up to $15.49 a month (up $1.50 a month) and the Basic plan rose to $9.99 a month (up a buck a month).

Of course, you could argue that Netflix’s decision to yank its Basic tier in the US, UK, and Canadian markets counts as a de-facto price hike, at least for new customers and existing subscribers who were considering switching to the plan.

Now that the Basic plan is gone, the most affordable Netflix ad-free plan is the $15.49-a-month Standard tier. The only cheaper alternative is the $6.99-a-month Standard with Ads (formerly Basic with Ads) plan.

Meanwhile, Netflix announced that its password-sharing crackdown will expand to every market it serves, including India.

In addition, territories new to the crackdown won’t get the option to buy more extra households (aka “sub-accounts” or “extra members”) for Netflix streaming, although users will be able to transfer profiles to new or existing Netflix accounts.

In the US, it costs $7.99 a month to share a Netflix account with an “extra member,” while Netflix streamers in Canada and the U.K. must pay CAD$7.99 and £4.99 a month per extra household, respectively.