Get Disney Plus for cheap before its massive price hike tomorrow

Disney Plus bundle
(Image credit: Ink Drop / Shutterstock.com)

The price of Disney Plus is about to go up by almost 40% on December 8, and this is your last warning to save big on your subscription before it does.

Following in the footsteps of the other best streaming services like Netflix, Disney Plus is getting an ad-supported tier on December 8, and when it does the price of the ad-free version will rise from $7.99 per month to $10.99 per month (an increase of 37.5%). The new ad-supported tier will be introduced at the service’s current price of $7.99 per month.

But, if you act fast you can lock in a year of Disney Plus at an even cheaper rate than any of these options. Sign-up for a year-long Disney Plus subscription before December 8 and you can get 12 months of the service for $79.99 – the only downside is you have to pay the total upfront. In return for committing to a year of Disney Plus, you’ll bag your subscription for effectively $6.67 a month, a massive discount compared to what it will soon cost.

What is Disney Plus with ads?

Disney Plus’ new ad-supported tier is thankfully not as awful as many of us feared. Those of you who don’t want to commit to a year-long subscription but also want to stay subscribed for only $7.99 per month don’t have to worry too much about its introduction. As per an earnings call from earlier this year, at launch Disney Plus’ ad-supported tier will cap commercials at just four minutes per hour of content; plus, the service won’t show any adverts on content watched via the platform’s kid-friendly user profiles.

By comparison, this four-minute limit is the same for Netflix and HBO Max’s ad-supported tiers, but less than Disney’s other streaming service, Hulu, which runs up to 12 minutes of ads per hour of content. It’s also less than cable TV which typically bombards viewers with around 20 minutes of ads per hour of content.

It’s not yet clear if there will be any other constraints on ad-supported users though. Netflix has admitted that some movies and TV shows will be exclusive to the ad-free version of the service at first, and HBO Max’s ad-supported tier has also restricted some content to just its ad-free tier. 

That said, following reports that Disney has imposed a hiring freeze, and that the company's financial issues could cause the cancellation of shows like Spider-Man: Freshman Year, we expect Disney will want its ad-supported experiment to be a success. We wouldn't be shocked if Disney tried to make its service look as appealing as possible to convince people to sign up for Disney Plus instead of a rival.

Want to get the most out of Disney Plus? Read up on how to watch the Marvel movies in order, or find out which Marvel TV shows made it onto our best Disney Plus shows list.

Hamish Hector
Senior Staff Writer, News

Hamish is a Senior Staff Writer for TechRadar and you’ll see his name appearing on articles across nearly every topic on the site from smart home deals to speaker reviews to graphics card news and everything in between. He uses his broad range of knowledge to help explain the latest gadgets and if they’re a must-buy or a fad fueled by hype. Though his specialty is writing about everything going on in the world of virtual reality and augmented reality.