What happened
Disney+ launched in November 2019 at $6.99 a month, deliberately undercutting Netflix by half. Six years later the ad-free Premium plan is $18.99 — a 172% increase, the second steepest on this site, and the fastest by any measure that matters.
The escalation is easy to read in the timeline. A single dollar in March 2021. Then $3.00 in December 2022, $3.00 in October 2023, $2.00 in October 2024, $3.00 in October 2025. Since 2022 the increase has arrived every October like a season.
The December 2022 step is the one to look at: a 38% jump in a single month, landing the same week the ad-supported tier launched at $7.99 — almost exactly the old ad-free price.
Why
The launch price was customer acquisition, not economics. Disney needed subscriber numbers fast enough to convince investors it could compete with Netflix, and it bought them below cost. The streaming division lost billions doing it.
Around 2022 the mandate changed from growth to profitability, and the sub-$7 price had nowhere to go but up. The ad tier is central: advertising revenue per viewer can exceed subscription revenue, so every increase on the ad-free plan pushes subscribers toward the tier Disney would rather they were on. The annual plan tells the same story — $69.99 at launch, $189.99 today.
What you can do instead
Disney+ is a rental of a catalogue that can shrink whenever a licence expires. Films you own, served from a machine you control, do not disappear and do not reprice every October.