Amazon Prime and Netflix raise rates amid obscene profits
The frog sitting in a slowing raising to a boil pot water of water story is fake, you might know that already. Frog gets hot it hops out. Unfortunately what’s not fake is that model is the game plan of companies like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Kroger, etc to squeeze as much out of you as possible while still maintaining their customer base. Raise rates, customer says “oh, that’s $20 a year, meh.” You find out a few years later you’re paying twice as much for the same goods and services that cost the producer the same.
I started Amazon Prime back when it was $79 a year, and if I’m not mistaken there was some sort of offer I used that made my first year closer to $50. I used it for work, better shipping, and to not have to purchase a certain amount of things in order to get “free” shipping.
In the years since Prime started, there’s been a movie industry added, a photo vault, one and two day delivery, grocery delivery service. While I use the photo vault, and Invincible was worth the price of admission, for me a 16% price hike yearly ($139), or 15% monthly ($179.88 yearly) after making only $469.82 billion last year (an 18.4% increase.)
On the Netflix side – the little movie studio that claimed it could push 4K, it appears to have only generated slightly shy of $30 billion last year. Of course they have to raise rates roughly 11% for what they claim is 4K (sorry guys, I’ve seen 720p crisper than that crap you call 4K). The average price per plan is going up between $1 and $2 a month.
This price increase on higher bandwidth content comes as bandwidth has plummeted in cost per gigabit year over year. I mean seriously, at this point you can have a devoted 1 gig fiber connection for less than $500 a year. When Netflix started pricing was 10x that.
Oh, but they’ve got expenses
Nope, that’s profit up there. They made obscene profits and they’re working on making more without delivering anything that costs them more. Amazon has over 200 million Prime subscribers so assuming they’re all yearly that’s a little bonus of $4 billion they’re adding to the bottom line just on membership fees.
Netflix with 221.8 million subscribers we’ll assume is giving itself a $332.7 million a month / $4 billion yearly raise.
I cancelled Prime, dropped Netflix to a bandwidth plan they actually can maintain (no really, their 4K looks like hot garbage, look at a UHD disc sometime.)
I just saved $193
Cancelled Prime, dropped Netflix to a resolution they can support, now looking at other recurring charges now. It’s felt kind of liberating.
