Netflix is about to kick your best friend off your account — unless you pay for them to share your account, that is. On Tuesday, Netflix revealed the details of how its crackdown on password sharing will affect viewers in the US and how much it will cost to keep extra people on your account.
If you have the Netflix Standard plan that costs $15.49 per month, then you have the option of adding one extra member who can use the service outside your household for $7.99 extra each month. Anyone who pays for the Netflix Premium package with 4K streaming has the option of adding up to two extra members, but each one will still cost another $7.99. Netflix subscribers on its two cheapest plans (Basic or Standard with Ads, which cost $9.99 and $6.99 per month, respectively) don’t have the option to add extra members to their account at all.
Netflix subscribers in the US who share the service “outside their household” will get this email from the company beginning on Tuesday, according to the blog post.
A support page explaining the new setup describes “extra members” as someone who will have their own password and profile, paid for by the person who “invited” them to join. Extra member accounts also have their own set of restrictions — they have to be activated in the same country, they can only view or download content on one device at a time, and they can’t create extra profiles or log in as a Kids profile.
Netflix used to be very pro-password sharing — it famously tweeted that “Love is sharing a password” in March 2017. (That tweet, as of this writing, is still up.) But in early 2022, it started testing ways to end the practice and get people to pay for accounts using Netflix outside of the account owner’s household.
And in April 2022, the company revealed that it lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade, and it said at the time that more than 100 million households were getting Netflix through password sharing. As it’s tried to turn that subscriber growth around, cracking down on password sharing is just one of many levers the company has pulled.
