We are happy Netflix customers since 2009. Or we were until this week they sent us the now famous email regarding the “change of plans” they are implementing. Now from $10.79/ month that is our current streaming + 1DVD at a time plan, we’ll be jumped to a $15.99 + tax plan. $6 is not much but it comes to 60% in price with 0% service increase. it seems too much by any economic terms.
As everybody knows they have been getting a lot of pressure from content providers in their broadcast deals and now they are trying to recoup some of those extra fees. Well, given the situation we have 3 options:
- Continue with the same plan and swallow the extra $6/month
- Cancel our sub completely.
- Change to the $7.99 plan with streaming only as most of the grils’ shows are there (we unplugged from cable tv 6 months ago)
Given the analysis spree I’ve been in the last weeks, I wanted to check how much are we getting from the subscription. I found this useful Netflix History Analyzer that uses the historic data from your account and I got this results:
Your results
You’ve rented 126 DVDs over 19 months from December 28, 2009 to July 09, 2011.
Your plan costs $8.99/month so you’ve paid $170.81 total.
Your average price per rental was approximately $1.36 each.
Average rental costs elsewhere are $1.00 each (not including late fees).
You’ve overpaid approximately $44.81 over that time period or $2.36 per month.
Here’s some more about your renting habits…
You kept each rental for around 2 days on average.
The longest you kept a single DVD was 16 days.
You rented about 7 DVDs each month.
You’re renting at or better than the estimated limit for your plan of 6 DVDs each month.
So apparently we’ve been doing quite good. Now to the new price analysis: renting 6 movies a month for $8 now looks like a bad idea given Redbox price of $1/day we have around and some new boxes we’ve been popping up near home that charge 89c/day.
Going back to the options we have:
- Keep same plan: paying more for the same? I don’t even like to pay the same for the same, so this is a definite no
- Cancel sub: My wife would kill me. She almost did it after a few weeks we disconnected the cable tv service.
- Change to streaming only plan: This seems the most appealing plan, as it will have the minor price increase if we continue with our current trend of getting an avg of 6 DVDs/month. $7.99 all streaming + redbox (with the “inconvenienve” of having to stop by the box in our grocery trips or gas fills) it is!!
Thanks to Netflix’s increase we will now have to restrict ourselves to a lesser variety in Redbox kiosks, but I’m sure we’ll also rent less physical DVDs. Congratulations to Netflix for increasing Redbox’s numbers in a single stroke!