This week, Apple raised the costs of its subscription services. Nobody likes a surprise price hike. I was reluctant to accept increased expenses. At the same time, my family was in need of more iCloud storage space, which would cost us more. One way or another, I wanted to avoid all this. So we quickly unbundled our subscription plan!
We had been sharing "Apple One Family." That means Music, TV+, Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud+. It was a good deal at $23/mo. But 200GB is peanuts; we needed more. So I had also tacked on an additional 200GB of straight iCloud+ on the side for another $3/mo. So we were paying $26/mo. That's not too bad when you realize that five people were benefitting from those four services across multiple devices.
Still, $26/mo isn't nothing; it adds up to $312/yr!
So with Apple's price hikes, we were looking at paying an additional $3/mo for Apple One Family. And we'd also still need to upgrade our iCloud storage, trading the $3 - 200GB tier out for the $10 - 2TB tier. That'd cost us another $7/mo. So our total monthly cost would go from $26/mo to $36/mo. Yikes. Big thumbs down on that.
After looking at the new plan price increases and weighing our greater storage needs, I decided to slash the bundle!
- We don't need Arcade
- We don't need TV+
- We need storage (lots)
- We "need" Music
Now we have 2TB of iCloud+ for $10/mo. And we have just Apple Music Family for $17/mo. Our new monthly cost went up but only by $1/mo. Instead of $26, it's now $27/mo. That's much better than the $36/mo we were initially looking at.
We didn't use TV+ or Arcade much, so while we're now paying one dollar more each month, we're also gaining 1.6TB of extra cloud storage. Frankly, that's needed when five people across ten devices rely on ubiquitous cloud file sync. (I could blog a whole separate post about cloud-versus-local storage and the paltry drive space built into computers these days...)
Now Apple is getting more money from my family every month. It's just a dollar but still more than before. Yet due to today's norm of cloud storage convenience, we'd pay Google, Microsoft, or Dropbox if not Apple. It is what it is; we try to be frugal. Inflation or not, I'll keep my eyes open for other opportunities to mitigate or avoid higher subscription expenses.