Apple has a habit of raising prices when you’re not quite ready for it. As reported by Engadget, the company just pushed through another increase on Apple TV+ subscriptions in the US, and the timing is almost perfectly calibrated to hit right before the next wave of hardware spending season.
A monthly Apple TV+ plan now costs $15, up from $13. An annual subscription jumped $20 to $120 per year. The individual Apple One bundle, which packages Apple TV+ with other Apple services, also goes up by $2 to $22 per month. Other Apple One tiers are unchanged for now. New subscribers pay the higher rates immediately. Existing subscribers get a one-month warning before the increase hits their bills.
This is the fourth price increase in four years. In 2019, Apple TV+ launched at $5 per month, positioning itself as the scrappy, affordable alternative to Netflix and Hulu. That pitch is long gone. At $15 a month, the service has tripled in price and now sits in the same tier as its much larger competitors, despite a content library that many subscribers would describe as thin by comparison. Apple produces prestige TV, not volume. You are paying more for a smaller selection, and Apple is betting that Severance and a handful of other critical darlings are worth it.
The broader streaming industry has been running the same playbook. Netflix, Prime Video, and YouTube Premium all raised prices this year. ESPN plans go up next month. What we are watching, across the board, is the end of the subscriber-growth phase for streaming. Companies spent years burning cash to win users. Now they are extracting value from the users they have. Apple is no different, and its leverage here is real: Apple TV+ is bundled into Apple One, tied to device purchases, and deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem. Switching costs are real, even if the streaming content itself is replaceable.
Apple typically throws in three months of Apple TV+ access with new device purchases, which softens the blow slightly. But that framing deserves scrutiny. New iPhones are expected to arrive shortly, and early reports suggest the base iPhone 18 may be pushed to a spring release, with Apple focusing its September event on the Pro models only. Those Pro models are expected to carry higher price tags themselves. So the pattern here is consistent: more expensive hardware, more expensive services, and the free trial window shrinking in real value as the subscription cost climbs.
From a privacy and digital rights angle, the price structure of Apple One also deserves attention. The bundle ties together Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, iCloud storage, and depending on the tier, Apple Fitness+ and Apple News+. That kind of bundling encourages users to consolidate more of their digital life inside Apple’s ecosystem. More services used means more behavioral data generated, even from a company that markets itself on privacy. Convenience and cost savings come with a trade-off: deeper lock-in and a broader footprint of personal data sitting inside one corporate infrastructure.
The bottom line is straightforward. Apple TV+ is no longer a budget service, it hasn’t been for a while, and the company shows no sign of slowing the annual price creep. If you’re a current subscriber, check your billing date and decide before the notification arrives whether the lineup still justifies $15 a month or $120 a year. Because Apple has already made its decision for you.