Netflix subscribers in South Africa have gradually been receiving price increase notifications over the last few months.
The streaming giant first announced price changes to its Standard and Premium plans in October 2021.
Netflix said the new prices reflected improvements to its content catalogue and new features on the platform and were necessary to continuously increase the service’s value proposition.
The pricing revisions included Standard plans increasing from R139 per month to R159 and Premium jumping from R169 to R199.
The prices of the Mobile and Basic plans remained the same, at R49 and R99, respectively.
Related: DStv packages price increase for 2022
Netflix said at the time prices would be increased in the “coming weeks”, and that existing members would be notified by email and within the Netflix app a month before the new prices were applied to them.
New customers would pay the increased prices from day one.
The table below summarises the new and old pricing of each Netflix plan in South Africa.
The extended timeline for the increases has caused some confusion among Netflix subscribers in South Africa.
While certain existing members are still paying the old price, others have cried foul over already paying the new fees.
One MyBroadband employee’s price increase already came into effect in December, while two others only saw their price changes implemented from February.
A MyBroadband forum member also reported his increase came into effect in January.
Therefore, the confusion comes from Netflix not implementing pricing changes across the board from a set date, like some other online services do.
Instead, it implements price changes to specific customers based on their billing cycles.
Netflix customers are billed on different dates, depending on when they signed up for the service.
That means that some who signed up later in the month would only start paying their new fee at a later stage.
It is unclear why the changes weren’t implemented during the same month for all customers, however.