Subscription price increases in 2026, and who got grandfathered

Eight of the subscriptions this desk covers raised their US list price in the first eight months of 2026, and we can put a date on all eight. Bitwarden Premium went from $10.00 a year to $19.80 in January, a 98% rise and the largest of the year. Paramount+ Essential’s annual plan went from $59.99 to $89.99 on 15 January, up 50%. Spotify raised every plan on billing dates through February. 1Password Individual went from $35.88 to $47.88 a year on 27 March, up 33%. Netflix raised every tier the same day. YouTube Premium raised every plan from June. Then the music services moved late and separately: Apple Music in July and TIDAL on 3 August, both a dollar a month on the individual plan. Only two of the eight gave existing subscribers anything that changed what they actually paid: Bitwarden knocked 25% off the first renewal, and 1Password held the old price until each subscriber’s own renewal date. All figures below checked 23 August 2026.

There is no ledger at the top of this piece, which is unusual for us. A ledger holds current prices this desk has read on a screen itself. This is a log of changes, most of them historical, and the old prices in it are by definition not readable anywhere any more. So the numbers live in the table and nowhere else, and we have said where each one came from.

The log

Chronological, oldest first, so it can be appended to for the rest of the year.

US list prices in US dollars, excluding tax. Percentages are ours, calculated from the two prices in each row and rounded to one decimal place. Dates are the date the new price took effect, not the date it was announced; where a service rolled the change out across billing cycles we have given the month rather than pretend to a day.

Two more music increases are missing a row rather than missing from the year. Standalone YouTube Music Premium also went from $10.99 to $11.99, and Amazon Music Unlimited from $10.99 to $12.99 — Amazon's own newsroom page was still printing the old figures when we looked on 23 August 2026. We have both halves of each of those and no effective date we can stand behind, and the rule below says a row needs both. They go in the day we can date them.

Grandfathering is the column nobody checks

The percentage is what gets reported. The last column is what decides whether the percentage is your problem this month or in eleven months’ time, and in 2026 it took five distinct shapes.

Nothing at all, which is the normal case. Netflix, Paramount+ and YouTube Premium each moved every existing subscriber onto the new price at their next billing date. Netflix’s increase applied to new members immediately on 27 March and reached existing members as their cycles came round over the following weeks. YouTube announced in April and the money started moving in June statements. The notice is real, the relief is not.

A grace period to leave, which sounds better than it is. Spotify emailed subscribers and gave them one month before the new price applied, and anyone still on a trial offer got one month at the original price after the trial ended. That is a month to cancel, not a month at the old rate on an ongoing basis, and the two get confused constantly.

Your own renewal date, which is the only real reprieve on this list. 1Password’s new prices applied to renewals falling on or after 27 March 2026; anything renewing before that date went through at the old rate. If your year happened to tick over on 20 March you kept $35.88 until March 2027, and if it ticked over on 30 March you did not. That is not a policy, it is a calendar.

Nothing we could establish, which is where the two music rows sit. Neither Apple nor TIDAL published a statement about existing subscribers that we could read on 23 August 2026, so that column says so rather than guessing in either direction.

A discount on the way in. Bitwarden gave every existing Premium subscriber a one-time 25% loyalty discount on their first renewal — about $14.85 against the new $19.80 — with standard pricing from the year after, and a 15-day notice before the renewal date. It is the most generous treatment in this year’s log, and it still ends up at $19.80.

There is a sixth shape and it only exists because a regulator put it there. In Europe, 1Password subscriptions do not simply renew at the higher price: a subscriber who does not actively approve the new price has the subscription cancelled instead. Nobody built that out of kindness. It is worth knowing that the same company, on the same product, in the same month, defaults to “you are now paying more” in one market and “you are now paying nothing” in another.

What each rise costs over a year

The monthly deltas look survivable, which is the point of quoting them monthly.

The twelve-month columns are our arithmetic on the list prices in the log above, not quoted prices, and they assume nothing else changes for a year. Monthly plans are multiplied by twelve; annual plans are the annual figure.

Take three ordinary subscriptions that a lot of people hold at once: Netflix Standard, Spotify Premium Individual and YouTube Premium Individual on monthly billing. In January 2026 that was $43.97 a month. Since June it has been $48.97. Over twelve months, $527.64 becomes $587.64. Sixty dollars, for the same three things, in one calendar year, without anybody choosing anything.

The password managers had the loudest year

Streaming did the volume in 2026. Password managers did the percentages, and by a distance.

Bitwarden’s Premium tier had sat at $10.00 a year for roughly a decade. In January it went to $19.80, which is a 98% increase, and it is the single largest rise in this log by a factor of two. The company’s framing is that a decade of flat pricing had to end and that the plan gained security features on the way through. Both things can be true and the bill still doubles. The free tier, which is the reason most people are there, was left alone.

1Password’s move was much smaller in percentage terms and slightly bigger in cash: Individual from $35.88 to $47.88 a year, Families from $59.88 to $71.88. Both are exactly $12 a year. A dollar a month is an easy sentence to write in an email, and it arrives as 33% and 20%.

The old Individual figure did not disappear, either. $35.88 is now the first-year promotional rate 1Password advertises as $2.99 a month, printed beside a struck-through $3.99 that is the new standard. Year one costs a new customer exactly what it cost before March. Year two is where the increase lands, which is the shape this desk sees most often and the reason our password manager ledger records $47.88 as the price rather than $35.88.

The two together are worth noting because a password manager is the subscription people are least likely to cancel over price. That is not cynicism about the vendors, it is arithmetic about switching costs, and the pricing in this category has started to reflect it.

The increase that never touched the price

Perplexity Pro has cost $20 a month throughout 2026. What it buys has reportedly not stayed still: through late 2025 and into May 2026, users and several outlets documented the Pro allowance for advanced model queries falling from around 600 a week to around 200, and Deep Research runs dropping from roughly 50 a month to about 20, without an announcement. Perplexity’s response has been that tightened limits are aimed at promotional-code resale and fraud rather than ordinary subscribers.

We have not verified the caps ourselves and this log does not carry a row for it, because the price did not move. It goes in the piece anyway, because on a per-unit basis it is the same event as a price rise and it is the one that never shows up on a statement. If you paid for a year in advance, a cut to what the year contains is a price increase you have already paid.

That is the general shape to watch for in AI subscriptions specifically: the tier names are stable, the $20 price point is stable, and the caps underneath are where the movement is.

Where nothing moved

Three of this desk’s categories have no 2026 entry at all, which is itself a finding.

Cloud storage. We logged no US list-price increase for Dropbox, Google One or iCloud+ in 2026. Google went the other way on 1 April 2026, taking the storage allowance on its AI Pro plan from 2 TB to 5 TB and leaving the price at $19.99 a month. Storage per dollar has been quietly getting better while everything else got worse, which is the only sentence in this piece anybody will enjoy.

VPNs. No 2026 list-price change we could date for NordVPN or Proton VPN. This category does its damage differently: the advertised monthly rate is a first-term rate on a two-year commitment, and the step up happens at renewal rather than by announcement. That is a renewal problem, not an increase, and it gets its own piece.

Meal kits. Nothing announced in 2026 that we could date. HelloFresh and its competitors move money through per-serving pricing, box size and shipping rather than a headline subscription price, so an increase here usually arrives as an introductory discount expiring rather than as an email saying prices are going up.

What counts as an entry

So this stays consistent as the year fills in.

• A row is a US list price that changed, in US dollars, excluding tax.
• We log the date the new price took effect, not the date of the press release. Where the rollout ran across billing cycles, we log the month.
• One row per plan, not per service. A service that raises four tiers gets four rows, because “Netflix went up $2” is not true of the ad tier.
• A promotional discount ending is not an increase. Neither is a currency movement, and neither is a new, more expensive tier appearing above the old one.
• If we cannot find the old price stated by the vendor or in dated contemporaneous reporting, there is no row. An increase we cannot show both halves of is a rumour.
• A row also needs an effective date we can stand behind. Where we have both prices and no date, the increase is described in the piece and waits for its row.

Next update when something moves. That is the whole editorial calendar.