Why I am Canceling Netflix

I subscribed to Netflix before it felt like something everyone did. Back then it felt like a bargain — a growing library, no ads, and a single monthly charge that cost less than one cinema ticket. I have been a subscriber for years. I have watched the price creep up gradually and told myself each time that it was still worth it. I have defended Netflix to people who complained about it, argued that the originals justified the cost, and kept the subscription running even through stretches where I was barely using it.

That is over. I cancelled last month, and the most surprising thing about it was how obvious the decision felt once I actually made it. What follows is the honest reasoning — not a rage-quit over one bad show, but a considered look at why a service I once genuinely valued has, through a series of incremental decisions, managed to remove almost everything that made it valuable.

Q: Is canceling Netflix worth it financially? A: For most subscribers paying the standard or premium plan price, yes — particularly if you are not watching consistently every week. The standard plan in the US costs approximately $15.49 per month ($185/year); the premium plan is $22.99 per month ($276/year). If you are watching an average of two or three evenings per week, your effective cost per hour of viewing is comparable to or higher than renting individual films through Apple TV, Amazon, or YouTube. Rotating subscriptions — subscribing for one or two months when something you want to watch is available, then canceling — typically costs 40–60% less than a continuous subscription over a year.

1. The Price Increases Never Stopped

This is the most straightforward reason and the one that compounded all the others. When I started subscribing, the standard plan cost around $9–10 per month. The price is now $15.49 for the standard plan and $22.99 for premium in the United States. That is a roughly 130% increase in the standard plan price over approximately a decade, at a time when general consumer inflation was running at 2–3% annually for most of that period.

Each individual increase felt small and reasonable — a dollar here, two dollars there, always accompanied by a press release about investment in new content. But the cumulative effect is a service that costs more than twice what it once did for a content library that has not remotely doubled in quality or relevance to my interests. I have started asking, each month when the charge hits my account, whether I would sign up for this service today at this price if I were encountering it fresh. The honest answer has been no for longer than I care to admit.

Netflix’s price increases have outpaced inflation, outpaced competitor pricing at equivalent tiers, and — in my case — outpaced my actual usage of the service. At a certain price point, the value proposition simply stops working, and Netflix crossed that threshold for me.

2. The Password Sharing Crackdown Changed the Calculus

For years, sharing a Netflix account across a household — or across a small group of people who split the cost — was an unofficial but widely tolerated feature of the service. Netflix knew it was happening. Their own executives publicly acknowledged that password sharing was a sign of subscriber love, not a problem to be solved. Then in 2023, they solved it anyway.

The paid sharing enforcement — which effectively requires each person watching on a separate household’s network to pay for their own account — was rolled out aggressively across markets and generated one of the most significant subscriber backlashes in the company’s history, followed by a period where subscriber numbers increased as previously sharing households formalised separate subscriptions.

I understand the business case. I do not particularly fault them for enforcing it. But the password sharing crackdown removed a structural benefit that had been part of my own value calculation. The account I had access to previously, shared and cost-split, no longer works that way. The full monthly price — unshared — is a different proposition from the partial contribution I was making before. When you remove a benefit and simultaneously charge more for what remains, canceling becomes rational in a way it was not before.

3. The Algorithm Knows What I Have Already Watched

Netflix’s recommendation algorithm — once one of its most praised features — has become something I find actively annoying. The problem is structural rather than superficial: the algorithm is very good at identifying what I have enjoyed in the past and very poor at surfacing things I have not yet seen that I might genuinely like. The result is a homepage dominated by things I have already watched, things I have already dismissed, and things in adjacent categories to what I have watched that assume my taste is narrower than it is.

Every session starts with the same ritual: scroll through the homepage noticing nothing I want to watch, search for something specific and find it is either not available or has been removed, briefly consider something in the top 10 (which invariably feels designed for a different audience than me), and eventually rewatch something I have already seen because the friction of finding something new is higher than the friction of revisiting something comfortable.

This is a failure mode, and it is my failure mode with Netflix specifically. It is not inevitable — it is a product of how Netflix has designed its interface and personalisation system, which prioritises surface area and engagement signals over genuine discovery. Other platforms handle this better. The failure of the recommendation engine does not invalidate the content library, but it does mean that the library’s value is less accessible than it should be, which affects the practical utility of the subscription.

4. The Originals Quality Has Become Inconsistent

Netflix built its reputation on originals that were genuinely remarkable — early seasons of shows that felt like they were being made for an audience rather than for a quarterly engagement metric. That period produced content that people still talk about and rewatch years later.

The current original content strategy feels different. The volume of Netflix originals is enormous and the quality distribution is very wide. For every genuinely excellent original series or film, there are dozens of shows that feel produced to fill content slots — serviceable, watchable, instantly forgettable. They have the production values of prestige television and the narrative ambition of a direct-to-DVD release.

I am not saying Netflix does not produce good things anymore. They do. But the ratio of time I spend being impressed by Netflix originals to time I spend watching things that feel like content rather than art has shifted dramatically. The originals that defined the service’s reputation were the product of a specific creative moment that was also a specific business moment — when Netflix was disrupting the industry and had both the money and the hunger to take genuine creative risks. That moment has passed, and the content strategy reflects a company that is now a mature incumbent managing quarterly results rather than a challenger building something new.

5. The Library Keeps Shrinking for International Content

One of the things I genuinely valued about Netflix was its international content library — Korean drama, Scandinavian crime, Spanish thriller, Japanese anime. The platform was, for a period, the most accessible route to non-English-language film and television for the average American viewer. Netflix’s investment in international originals was real and produced some of the best television of the past decade.

But the licensing landscape has fragmented, international rights have become more contested and more expensive, and the streaming wars have produced competing platforms — including country-specific services and general streaming competitors — that have picked off rights Netflix once held. The international library is smaller and less reliably updated than it was at peak.

This matters to me more than it might to a viewer whose primary interest is English-language content. For viewers who discovered international cinema through Netflix and built viewing habits around that library, the partial withdrawal from that strength is a genuine content degradation.

Netflix’s international content library was, for several years, one of the most compelling reasons to subscribe — and its partial retreat from that strength is one of the most underreported reasons that previously committed subscribers are finding the service less essential than they once did.

6. The Ads Tier Makes the Price Comparison Even Worse

Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier in late 2022, positioned as a cheaper entry point that would expand the subscriber base. In practice, the ads tier changed how I think about the premium tiers: I am now paying a significant premium over the ads tier price specifically to not watch advertisements. This reframes the value proposition in a way that is unflattering to Netflix.

The standard with ads plan is currently $7.99/month in the US. The standard plan without ads is $15.49/month. I am paying an extra $7.50 per month — $90 per year — specifically for the absence of interruptions. When I frame it that way, I am paying almost as much for the absence of ads as I am for the content itself. That calculation does not sit well with me, and I suspect it will sit increasingly poorly with subscribers who think about it carefully.

The ads tier also carries content restrictions — some content is unavailable at the ads tier due to licensing restrictions — which further concentrates the value at the higher-priced tiers and increases the per-dollar cost of the full library. These are individually small choices that collectively shift the value equation against the subscriber and toward Netflix’s revenue objectives.

7. Better Alternatives Now Exist

When I first subscribed to Netflix, the alternatives were genuinely inferior. Hulu had a much smaller library and the basic tier had ads. Amazon Prime Video was an afterthought bundled with a shipping subscription. Disney+ did not exist. Apple TV+ did not exist. HBO Max did not exist. The competitive landscape has transformed.

Today, the alternatives collectively offer more of what I actually want to watch than any single service. Apple TV+ produces original content at a quality level that is consistently higher than Netflix’s average, at a lower price point ($9.99/month in the US), with a smaller but more curated library that spends almost no time surfacing things I do not want to watch. HBO Max / Max has the HBO library, which is genuinely irreplaceable for drama and prestige television. Disney+ covers franchise content and the Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars catalogues. Amazon Prime Video, included with a Prime membership many people already have, has a content library large enough to provide genuine choice.

The era of Netflix as the only real choice for streaming is well over. In a multi-platform world, a sensible viewing strategy is rotating subscriptions — maintaining one or two services at a time and cycling through others based on what specific content you want to watch — rather than paying for all of them simultaneously on the assumption that one platform will always have something you want.

A rotating subscription strategy — subscribing to Netflix for two months to watch a specific series, canceling, and subscribing to a competitor for the next thing you want — typically costs 40–60% less than maintaining continuous subscriptions to multiple services, and produces a more intentional viewing experience than having an always-available library that generates passive scrolling.

I do not expect to never subscribe to Netflix again. There will almost certainly be specific content I want to watch that is available only on Netflix, and when that moment arrives, I will resubscribe for the month I need and cancel again. That is a more rational relationship with the service than the continuous subscription I maintained out of inertia for longer than was sensible.

The decision to cancel was not dramatic. It was a recognition that the service I was paying for was no longer the service I was getting value from — and that the path of least resistance (keeping the subscription running, not thinking about it, letting the monthly charge clear quietly) was a habit worth breaking. The money freed up by canceling goes back to things that deliver clearer value.

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