Five months ago we published The Keep List. Then Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Adobe all raised prices. Here is what survives the new math, what got pushed off, and one bundle that quietly became the best value in tech.
What changed since January
We published this list on January 1. By March, most of the prices on it were wrong. Here is the running tally of US consumer-subscription price changes between January and May 2026, the ones large enough to change a household's monthly outlay by real dollars.
| Service | Was | Now | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spotify Premium (Individual) | $11.99 | $12.99 | Jan 15, 2026 |
| Spotify Family | $19.99 | $21.99 | Jan 15, 2026 |
| Netflix with Ads | $7.99 | $8.99 | Mar 26, 2026 |
| Netflix Standard | $17.99 | $19.99 | Mar 26, 2026 |
| Netflix Premium | $24.99 | $26.99 | Mar 26, 2026 |
| Prime Video ad-free add-on | $2.99 | $4.99 (Prime Video Ultra) | Apr 10, 2026 |
| YouTube Premium (Individual) | $13.99 | $15.99 (from June) | Announced May 2026 |
| YouTube Premium Family | $22.99 | $26.99 (from June) | Announced May 2026 |
| Adobe All Apps : replaced | $54.99 | Standard $54.99 / Pro $69.99 | Tier split, Aug 2025 |
| ChatGPT (new mid tier) | Plus $20 or Pro $200 | + new Pro $100 | Apr 9, 2026 |
| Notion AI add-on | $10 add-on for any tier | Retired. AI only in Business ($20/seat) | Effective May 2025, hit Plus users through 2026 |
| Apple TV+ (standalone) | $9.99 | $12.99 | Aug 2025 |
| Apple One (unchanged) | $19.95 / $25.95 / $37.95 | Same | Held since Nov 2023 |
Across a typical household subscription bundle (Netflix Standard, Spotify Family, YouTube Premium Family, one Prime Video Ultra add-on), the price-hike wave costs about $11 a month more in May 2026 than it did on December 31, 2025. That is roughly one extra subscription a year, paid for nothing new.
Most of January's Keep List survives, but the bar is higher. iCloud+, 1Password, Apple Fitness+, Audible, Strava, Costco, and Headspace are all unchanged in price and still earn their fee. Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime are defensible at the new prices if you actually use them weekly. The big mover is Apple One, which we upgraded from "good bundle" to "best-value subscription of 2026" because every service inside it raised prices while the bundle did not. The big loser is Notion Plus, which quietly lost most of its AI value and now sits in an awkward middle. We also moved YouTube Premium from the streaming category into a "running the numbers again" warning: the June 2026 jump to $15.99 turns it from contrarian-good into hard-to-justify for most people.
If you only act on one section of this article, read this one. These three moves can offset the entire 2026 price-hike wave for a typical household.
Run the numbers. Buying the Family tier separately costs $12.99 (Apple TV+, after its August 2025 hike), $16.99 (Apple Music Family), $9.99 (Apple Arcade), $9.99 (iCloud+ 200GB Family) and $9.99 (Fitness+ Family). That is $59.95 a la carte. Apple One Family is $25.95. The 56 percent discount is the largest spread of any major US bundle, and it has held flat since November 2023 while every individual service inside it went up. If you have an iPhone and at least one family member who watches Apple TV+ shows or listens to Apple Music, this is the single highest-leverage swap you can make in 2026.
Worth it if: You already pay for any two Apple services separately, or your household has more than one iPhone. The Premier tier ($37.95) adds 2TB iCloud+ and News+. Math still works.
Not for you if: You only use one Apple service (just buy that one). Or you are an Android-first household: Google One plus a music service is cheaper.
The most surprising line item on the 2026 subscription landscape: the entry-level AI tier did not move. OpenAI added a new $100 ChatGPT Pro tier on April 9, 2026 to slot between Plus and the existing $200 Pro, but Plus itself still costs $20. Anthropic added Max tiers at $100 and $200, and Claude Pro still costs $20 (or $17 a month if you commit annually). Twenty dollars for a daily-driver AI assistant remains the highest-ROI knowledge-work subscription you can buy, full stop. If you draft documents, code, summarize, or research even a few times a week, you make the money back in saved hours within a week.
Pick Claude Pro if: You write or code. The annual price ($17/mo effective) is the cheapest serious AI subscription in 2026. Memory and Cowork features are now standard on Pro.
Pick ChatGPT Plus if: You want image generation, voice mode, and the largest extension ecosystem. Do not pay for the $100 tier unless you are routinely hitting Plus limits.
Three dollars a month, unchanged. For automatic backup of every photo, document, and app setting. iCloud Private Relay and Hide My Email are quietly some of the best consumer privacy features any company ships. If your phone breaks tomorrow, everything is on the replacement device by lunchtime. The free 5GB tier remains a joke for anyone with a phone made in this decade. If you own an iPhone and you are not on at least the 200GB plan, this is the first $36 a year you should spend on tech.
Netflix raised every tier 11 percent on average on March 26. The ad-supported tier is still the right pick for almost everyone: at $8.99, the per-hour cost of Netflix content is still below every other major library if you watch more than four hours a month. The standard ad-free tier at $19.99 crosses a line. At twenty dollars a month with no live sports, ad-free Netflix has become a luxury rather than a default. Drop to the ad tier or rotate out for a quarter.
Worth it if: You watch two or more shows a month and can tolerate four to five minutes of ads per hour. The library breadth still has no real peer in 2026.
Cancel if: You only watch one show. The rotate-and-cancel pattern (subscribe, binge, cancel within 30 days) is the right play for a single-show viewer in 2026.
Third price hike in four years. The dollar bump in January 2026 is small individually and significant in aggregate: Spotify Family rose from $19.99 to $21.99, which is the line item to actually pay attention to if you are a household. The library, the algorithm, and Smart Shuffle still justify the price for daily listeners. The two threats to Spotify in 2026 are Apple Music inside Apple One (more on that above) and YouTube Music bundled with YouTube Premium. If you already pay for either of those bundles, paying $12.99 separately for Spotify is the redundancy to cut first.
Worth it if: You listen 30+ minutes daily and Spotify Wrapped genuinely matters to you. Family plan at $21.99 split four ways is still under $6 per person.
Cancel if: You already pay for Apple One. Apple Music is now genuinely on par with Spotify on catalog and audio quality. Pay once.
In January we called this our "most contrarian pick." That was at $13.99. Google announced the first US price hike since 2023 in May, taking the individual plan to $15.99 a month and the Family plan from $22.99 to $26.99 in June 2026. At $15.99, the value calculation breaks differently. YouTube Music is still bundled (which softens the blow), but you are now paying more than Spotify Family on a per-person basis if your household is one. Existing student memberships are also being auto-converted to full-price individual plans starting January 2026 unless re-verified. If you watch desktop YouTube with an ad blocker and use a separate music service, cancel. If you are deep in mobile YouTube and Spotify is up for renewal, this is a wash.
Still worth it if: You watch 1+ hours daily on mobile and YouTube Music genuinely replaces Spotify. Family plan at $26.99 split is the saving play.
Cancel if: You mostly use desktop YouTube. uBlock Origin and a separate music sub costs nothing close to $16 a month.
One of the few major consumer subscriptions that did not move in Q1/Q2 2026. Still $14.95 for one credit a month plus the Plus catalog. The annual play ($149.50, or $89 introductory) lowers the effective cost to $7.42 a month for an audiobook habit. The genuine objection is not price, it is Libby: most public libraries now have audiobook waitlists that have dropped under two weeks for popular titles, and library audiobooks remain free. If you only finish one book a month, try Libby first. If you want simultaneous releases and bingeable series, Audible still has the catalog.
The Trio bundle (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Select) with ads at $19.99 a month is the single best value play in streaming if you have a kid in the house or you watch live sports. ESPN Select brings live sports access into the bundle for less than you would pay for cable in 2009. Standalone Disney+ at $11.99 with ads or $18.99 without is harder to recommend on its own. Buy the bundle or skip Disney entirely.
Password reuse is still the single most common way consumers get hacked, and 1Password is still the best cross-platform manager going. The free alternatives (Apple Keychain, Google Password Manager) have improved, and Bitwarden is a credible free option for the technically inclined. But for $36 a year you get the family vault, secure document storage, Travel Mode for border crossings, and a passkey vault that works across iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and every major browser. Security spend is the only line item where "the cheapest option" is the wrong frame.
Notion changed the deal. The standalone $10 AI add-on was retired in May 2025, and through 2025 and into early 2026 Notion has steadily bundled full AI (Ask Notion, Custom Agents, AI Agents) exclusively into Business at $20 per seat. Plus users get trial-grade AI access, not the daily-driver tool the early reviews praised. If you bought Notion Plus in 2024 for the AI, you are now in an awkward middle: paying $10 a month for unlimited file uploads and database features that Apple Notes plus Numbers and a free Notion account can mostly replicate. We are taking it off the keep list. Pay nothing (free plan) or pay $20 for Business if you actually need the AI agents.
Quietly the most interesting bundle of 2026 for office workers. Microsoft 365 Personal now includes Copilot in Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint at no additional cost, and the consumer pricing has held flat through the July 2026 commercial increase. If your work flows through Excel or Word and you currently pay $20 for ChatGPT Plus, swapping to Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99 plus the bundled OneDrive 1TB can outright replace two subscriptions for less than the cost of one. Caveat: Copilot in consumer apps still lags Claude and ChatGPT on raw quality. Use it for in-document tasks (rewrite this email, format this table) rather than as your general AI.
If you own an Apple Watch, this is the best home-workout subscription you can buy, and it is bundled into Apple One Family at no incremental cost. The Apple Watch integration (live heart rate, calorie burn, activity rings on screen) is what makes it stick where other home-workout services do not. Buying standalone at $9.99 is fine. Paying for Fitness+ separately when you already have Apple Music and iCloud+ is the kind of subscription stacking we wrote this article to talk you out of.
Free meditation apps exist and are decent. Headspace earns the $12.99 through structure: the sleep content library (Sleepcasts, soundscapes, wind-downs) and the multi-session anxiety and focus courses are paced in a way that random YouTube meditations are not. If you have tried meditating, given up, and tried again three times in your life, the structured path is the difference. If you have an established practice, an unguided timer app is fine and free.
Still $11.99 monthly. The annual price of $79.99 is the move (a $6.66 effective monthly rate). Route planning, training load analysis, and the segment leaderboards continue to be what gets serious runners and cyclists off the couch on bad-weather days. If your week does not include three or more runs or rides, the free tier is genuinely fine and Strava knows it.
Annual only. The monthly plan at $24.99 is a tax on indecision. Brilliant's interactive courses for data science, algorithms, physics, and math remain the best non-credentialed STEM learning product on the consumer market. The pedagogy genuinely beats lecture-style video courses for technical material. If you want a certificate at the end, this is not it. If you want to actually understand neural networks, it is.
Two things changed. First, Duolingo split into Super and Max ($29.99 monthly, $168 annually) where Max bundles AI Video Call and Roleplay practice. Second, in January 2026 Duolingo moved the most useful AI feature (Explain My Answer) into the free tier. The result is that Super now offers a thinner premium experience than it did, while Max sits at a price point that crosses the threshold where iTalki tutoring or a community college language class becomes the better buy. If you are serious about a language, Super is no longer enough and Max is no longer the right value. If you are casual, the free tier with Explain My Answer included is genuinely fine.
Medium quietly introduced a "Friends of Medium" tier at $15 per month or $150 per year above the $5 base, with implications about where the platform is steering its best writers. The $5 tier still exists and the catalog is still wide, but the editorial quality has not improved in a year. For specialized domains (tech, design, research), Substack newsletters now deliver what Medium used to: high-effort writing direct from people you trust. Replace the $5 Medium sub with one or two paid Substacks in your area of interest.
The annual fee is still $139 in 2026 (despite the spring rumors of an imminent increase, no announcement has landed as of May 18). The bigger story is the Prime Video ad-free add-on, which Amazon hiked from $2.99 to $4.99 on April 10 and rebranded as "Prime Video Ultra." That is a 67 percent increase for the same product (now with 4K and five-device streaming). If you watch Prime Video weekly, $4.99 is still defensible. If you watch monthly, eat the ads. Either way, Prime itself is on the keep list for the shipping economics alone if you order twice a month.
Still $65 for the Gold Star tier in 2026. Gas savings (typically 20 to 40 cents per gallon below market) often cover the membership for any household driving a normal weekly mileage. Kirkland Signature continues to be the unkillable value play in consumer goods. If you live alone in a small apartment with no Costco within 30 minutes, this is not for you. If you have a family of three or more, it is.
Useful for dual-income households where time has a high hourly value. Dangerous for everyone else, because the app is engineered to convert "I need eggs" into a $58 order with a hot dinner add-on. If you can name your last four grocery deliveries without checking the app, keep it. If you cannot, cancel and reinstate when you actually need it.
After a year of price hikes, the three questions are sharper. If a subscription cannot answer all three with a yes, cancel.
Weekly use is the minimum. Monthly services you use quarterly are a tax you pay to the vendor's churn-prevention team.
New question for 2026. The Apple One stack, the Disney/Hulu/ESPN Trio, and YouTube Premium with YouTube Music all include services people separately pay for. Audit the overlap once a quarter.
If yes, recalculate from zero. Loyalty pricing favors the vendor in 2026. The dollar you used to pay for Spotify is now $1.08, and the dollar you used to pay for Netflix Standard is now $1.11. Compound that across a household.
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