Save Money on Streaming Services With a Hop-on Subscription
I’m not ashamed to admit that I watched the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale on the 7-day free trial of Hulu.
I also feel free to admit that last December I paid for one month of Netflix just so I could watch Christmas Prince, Christmas Prince II, and The One That Looks Like Christmas Prince, but the heroine is a baker, not a blogger, and other .
I also regularly subscribe to free trials of TV streaming services – Sling TV, DirecTV, YouTube TV, and more – so I don’t miss out on TV events like the Tony Awards or Steven Universe: The Movie .
No, I don’t go so far as to create new email addresses to keep getting free trials; it looks too much like cheating the system. Fortunately, there are so many new streaming services popping up with new free offers that I can claim and cancel immediately that I never have to.
Because if you choose to sign up for all of these services on a long-term basis, well … as Kevin McAllister explains in The Wall Street Journal , it will cost you:
This can happen quickly. You might pay $ 16 for a Netflix account and $ 6 for a Hulu subscription. Click for $ 13 for Amazon Prime here and $ 15 for HBO Go. But those prices that you may not think twice about at the moment may end up leaving you with only a $ 600 per video tab by the end of the year. This worked for me.
I spent $ 95.55 this year on a la carte streaming services, including the HBO month I bought to completely re- watch Game of Thrones before the last season (which turned out to be a huge waste of my time). I bought HBO Month 2 because that I just finished reading Olive Kitteridge and wanted to watch the miniseries and sometimes movies or TV shows that I rent from Amazon.
I also paid $ 127.33 for my annual Amazon Prime membership – the only subscription I refuse to cancel because it comes with free shipping. (Yes, I loved Fleabag. Hot Priest!) However, you can even pay for Prime as needed if you really want to; there is no law that says you have to sign up for a full year of Prime just because you saw a Carnival Row ad at the airport.
McAllister invites more of us to take advantage of what he calls “hopping subscriptions,” whether you pay for a month to use a particular streaming service to watch a particular show, or come to it even more strategically:
A friend of mine who I consider to be a superuser is taking it a step further by waiting for a critical mass of content to hit any given streaming service before signing up for a backup.
But since this is a jerk week, I have to point out that I already had this idea about three years ago – although, to be honest, I’m sure I’m not the only one who ever thought about it.
And now that you know how much money you can save, you can become a member too! Just … make sure not everyone does it, okay? Otherwise, all of these streaming media sites will change their pricing models and close this adorable little loophole.