Escape the family phone plan trap! Adulting means ditching Mom's bill and creating a group phone plan with your friends. Share the cost, not the awkwardness, and enjoy affordable cell service with your chosen family. (Trustworthy friends required!)
Subscription Overload: Are You Wasting Money on Streaming Services & More? Americans face a subscription crisis, juggling countless monthly payments for phones, streaming, fitness, and more. While individual services seem affordable, the total cost quickly escalates—the average American pays for five video subscriptions! From Netflix and HBO Max to Peacock and Paramount+, is it time to rethink your entertainment spending? Discover how to manage your subscriptions and avoid the hidden costs
Subscription costs soaring? Americans are creatively tackling rising prices by sharing accounts. From family phone plans extended to friends and acquaintances to password sharing for streaming services, consumers are finding loopholes and reinterpreting "family" to save money on everything from Netflix to cell phone bills. Is this savvy cost-cutting or a violation of terms of service? Learn how people are bending the rules – and whether it's worth the risk
Sharing subscriptions with friends: a savvy way to cut costs on streaming, phone plans, and more. Professor Daniel McCarthy, associate marketing professor at the University of Maryland, calls this powerful word-of-mouth marketing, essentially an extended free trial for users. Is sharing passwords and family plans the future of subscription management?
The rising cost of living is hitting everyone hard, especially single and childless Americans facing a "singles tax." Sharing expenses with friends – "friend socialism" – is becoming increasingly popular to combat this. From splitting streaming subscriptions like Spotify (even if it means fudging addresses) to sharing family phone plans, people are finding creative ways to save money on everyday costs. This trend highlights how the burden of multiple subscriptions—from streaming services to fitness apps—is driving innovative approaches to budget management and redefining the concept of "family" for financial benefit
Escape the family phone plan: Adulting on your own terms. Many adults remain on their parents' plan due to cost and convenience, but it's time to ditch the awkwardness and embrace a "chosen family" approach. Learn how to leverage friend-based phone plans from providers like T-Mobile and AT&T, saving money without the parental oversight. Discover the financial benefits of shared subscriptions and build a cost-effective plan with your closest friends. This is the smart, adult way to manage your phone bill and subscription costs
Save Money on Your Phone Bill: Sharing Plans with Friends
Tired of expensive phone bills? Join the growing trend of sharing phone plans with friends! Like Nicole, a Pennsylvania artist, who successfully shares a plan with her partner and former roommate, saving significantly on monthly costs. Nicole manages the account, receiving Venmo payments from her friends for their share. While a lost phone once required a group trip to the store, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. This "chosen family" approach offers financial benefits without the awkwardness of relying on parents. Learn how to share your phone plan and other subscriptions with trusted friends to cut costs and ditch those expensive individual plans
Missouri woman Rose Petargue shares her Nintendo Switch Online family plan with strangers online, extending access to multiplayer gaming. Offering extra slots on Reddit, she connects players from Turkey, the Caribbean, and beyond, providing affordable access to online gaming features. This generous act highlights the rising cost of subscriptions and the creative ways people find to share expenses, even with those they don't know personally. With individual plans ranging from $19.99 to $49.99, and her family plan costing $79.99 annually, she believes she's helping others experience the full community aspect of gaming. While technically bending the rules, she sees minimal risk and considers it a cost-effective solution for both herself and the players she assists. This innovative approach to subscription sharing exemplifies the changing dynamics of community and cost-sharing in the digital age
Sharing subscriptions with friends: a financially savvy move or a recipe for friendship drama? Splitting costs on services like phone plans and streaming (YouTube TV, Netflix, etc.) can save money, but disagreements over contributions—especially as prices rise—can strain relationships. One friend's ex stopped paying their share of a group phone plan, highlighting the potential pitfalls. Even seemingly simple shared subscriptions, like a YouTube TV family plan, can create awkward situations when asking friends to contribute more as costs increase from $35 in 2018 to $82.99 today. Learn how to navigate the tricky waters of shared subscriptions and avoid costly friend-breakups
Sharing a Peloton subscription with friends? New England resident Diane Brown shares her account with 20 users – family and friends – to save on the $44 monthly fee. While she happily shares her password, she periodically removes inactive users to maximize her investment. This savvy approach even led one friend to purchase their own Peloton bike! Learn how others are creatively managing subscription costs
Sharing subscriptions saves money, right? While companies prefer full-price payments, the reality of subscription costs—from phone plans to streaming services—is more complex. This article explores how consumers creatively share accounts to manage expenses, from family plans with friends to bending the rules of shared subscriptions. Discover the financial advantages and potential downsides of this increasingly popular trend
The cost-effectiveness of shared subscriptions, like family phone plans or streaming services, hinges on several factors: the provider's policies, the subscription stage, and subscriber commitment
Netflix's massive success partly stemmed from widespread password sharing, a tactic initially used to boost user acquisition. This "extended free trial" strategy, though eventually curtailed after reaching $33 billion in annual revenue, highlights how subscription services leverage shared accounts for growth before transitioning users to individual subscriptions
Sharing subscriptions with friends—a savvy way to manage monthly expenses and build lasting habits. Expert Robbie Kellman Baxter highlights this strategy for subscription services, emphasizing its effectiveness in fostering usage and understanding. From phone plans and streaming services to fitness apps, discover how shared subscriptions offer financial benefits and build community
Boost customer retention and loyalty by enabling account sharing. Shared plans, like a group Verizon phone plan, create significant switching costs. Losing one customer means losing potentially many more, increasing platform stickiness and reducing churn
Despite their original promise to free viewers from ads, more and more paid platforms are tossing advertising in the mix, meaning eyeballs may be more important than subscription fees. A good chunk of revenue in ad-supported plans comes from advertising, and it’s better for business if multiple people are getting hit with a bunch of ads than a single person being exposed to them.
“That’s made the subscription much more about engagement and view hours as opposed to, ‘Is this person going to mail in the check?'” McCarthy says. “It’s much less like the gym model, where the best gym member pays their fee but never goes into the gym. Now, suddenly, it’s about going in all the time.”
To be sure, companies such as Netflix and Disney are cracking down on friend socialism for a reason. Robert Fishman, a senior research analyst at MoffettNathanson, tells me it’s become an “increasing point of concern from the media companies to make sure they’re getting the appropriate subscription dollars from different households.” In an April survey from Pew Research Center, 26% of US streaming users said they used someone else’s password, including 47% of the 18-to-29 group.
“Looking backwards, the traditional media companies had to find the right balance of trying to have as many people as possible engaged in their content,” he says. “But it’s more recently shifted to ensuring that they’re getting paid for that viewership.”
From a consumer perspective, it’s hard to feel too guilty about playing it a little fast and loose on account sharing. Businesses are the ones who siloed content off and monetized every little thing in the first place. In turn, people find ways to fudge. Perhaps the terms of service on a subscription specify everyone has to be in a family or live in the same household, but it turns out as long as you all are in the same-ish geographic area — or just input the same address — it works just fine. Some groups develop elaborate plans for taking out and sharing various subscriptions, involving spreadsheets and coordination. Others keep it pretty simple. One colleague tells me she and her husband share a YouTube Premium subscription with a bunch of other friends. The company allows up to six accounts total on the plan, and they’re all supposed to be in the same household, but YouTube apparently isn’t checking. All they have to do is send over their portion to the original account holder once a year.
Sharing the wealth, accounts-wise, is a way for people to save money as prices get higher and subscriptions multiply. Across groups of friends, it’s a way to ease the financial burden and, sometimes, it can be a little fun, too. The only way everyone can discuss “Love Island USA” in the group chat is if they’ve all got access to Peacock. I share my Peloton account with a friend, and I like taking a peek to see what workouts she has (or hasn’t) been up to.
On a more serious note, not everyone has a family to share the family plan with, for a variety of reasons. Or, they’d just rather not wrangle their dad into an Apple Music subscription when he doesn’t even have an iPhone, or has only listened to the same Bob Seger CD on a loop in his car for a decade.
Some companies are coming around to that. A spokesperson for AT&T tells me they know families can “mean a lot of different things,” whether the traditional understanding or not. “We are perfectly fine with customers joining our multi-line and family plans, no matter how they’re related (blood, marriage, friends, co-workers, neighbors, roommates, etc.),” they say. AT&T has gone as far as to launch a payment tool to make it easier for people to split their plan costs.
People may not be able to share their mortgage cost with the friend who lives across the country, but they can add them to their Strava subscription. The “family plan” can mean whatever family you choose.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Business Insider’s Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day’s most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
Source: Original Article