Key Takeaways
- Use free trials to test YouTube Premium – it’s a week-long trial & can be a convenient way to avoid paying immediately.
- Consider annual payment – despite higher upfront cost, it can provide a 15% discount. Plus, it locks in the current rate until renewal.
- Family plan can save money – $22.99 for 5 people. Even for 2 users, it’s cost-effective. Make sure your users are over 13.
The prices of streaming services are on the rise, and YouTube Premium is no exception. Although YouTube Premium isn’t exactly a streaming service, it still costs $13.99 a month, a number that eventually led me to unsubscribe. I still enjoy a lot of what Premium has to offer, especially the ad-free viewing, but the price has become too much for me to justify.
Like any service, there are ways to not pay full price. Through free trials, promotions, or being a student, there are a few different ways to grab a discount on YouTube Premium. Here’s a look at some of the ways I found on how to lower the price of your YouTube Premium subscription.
YouTube Premium
- What’s included?
- YouTube and YouTube Music add-free and in the background
- Price
- $14 a month
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1 Use a free trial
The obvious example
Unsurprisingly, the best way to get YouTube Premium for cheap is to use a free trial since nothing beats free. If you’ve never signed up before, you have one available, and that’s the way I got started with the service in the first place. The trial runs for seven days, and that’s more than enough to get hooked on the service. I ended up keeping it for far longer following the trial, so it certainly worked on me.
Upon the completion of the trial, you’re automatically upgraded to a monthly subscription. If you don’t plan on keeping Premium longer than that, make sure you cancel beforehand. Canceling the Premium trial as soon as you sign up for it still gives you access throughout the week instead of revoking it right away.
2 Take advantage of being a student
It’s not all student loans
YouTube Premium
While you might incur a lot of debt from student loans as part of going to college, you do get some bonuses elsewhere. Students get YouTube Premium at a discounted rate of $7.99 a month compared to the full-priced $13.99 subscription. Your student status has to be updated annually, so you’ll eventually lose it if you graduate. However, if you’re on the verge of graduation, you can still subscribe and get a year-long subscription even if you have a month left of school.
The student status is verified through SheerID where you enter the name of your school, name, country, and date of birth. The system then checks to see if you’re enrolled and goes from there. You do all this through the YouTube Premium sign up page, so don’t fret if you’ve never heard of SheerID.
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3 Pay annually
A fine alternative
Paying for services annually is typically cheaper than going monthly, but it requires a higher upfront cost. That’s no different with Premium, but if you can spring for it, you can save some cash. The annual price is $139.99, which represents a 15% savings compared to going monthly. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like a massive savings, but it’s something that definitely adds up over the course of a year.
Another bonus of going annual is you’re locked into the rate until you renew. If the price of the service goes up, you don’t have to pay that increased price until you renew. Annual subscriptions don’t renew automatically as they do for monthly subscribers, so you have some time to think about whether you want to come back again when the year is up.
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4 Check your phone carrier
You might have a free subscription
If you have Google Fi as your phone carrier, there’s a chance you’re eligible for a 6-month subscription to YouTube Premium for free. You can check this by following these steps, as laid out by Google. This applies to the Google Fi Unlimited plan, and you’ll have to start paying again once the six months are up.
- On your mobile device, go to fi.google.com/account#plan.
- Go to your “Member Profile.”
- In the “Devices & Subscriptions” list, tap YouTube Premium and then Get started.
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
It makes sense that Google offers a Premium subscription since YouTube is owned by Google, but that’s not the only carrier involved. Verizon offers a phone plan where you can get Premium for $10 a month. This represents a savings of $3.99 each month, so it’s a number that adds up quite nicely over the year. It looks like these are the two carriers you need to get the discounted or free Premium, so you’re out of luck if you have AT&T or another service.
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5 Sign up for a family plan
Good for a group
The YouTube Premium family plan costs $22.99 a month, but it comes with the bonus of supporting up to five people in the same household. This is good news for a family who all wants Premium as it saves you from having to sign up for multiple $13.99 monthly subscriptions. Even if you’re just using it for two people, it represents decent savings. The value goes up even more if you have more people that can take advantage of it.
Of course, the only way a plan like this is worthwhile is if you have somebody to share it with. It makes no sense to sign up for it individually, hence the family plan name. Every user included in the plan has to be over 13 years old. Whether it’s two people or five using the plan, the monthly price remains the same, so you’re encouraged to get as many users using it as possible to get the most value.
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6 VPNs no longer work
A closed loophole
Something many people used to take advantage of is using a VPN to hide their location to find better rates. The way it worked was you could look for better prices around the world, use a VPN to set your location as that country, and then sign up for YouTube Premium with a discounted rate. You could typically find the best areas to sign up in by scouring Reddit and finding out what the community had to say.
It’s a smart idea, and it’s something that worked for a while until Google caught wind of it. As recently as June 2024, Google announced it was canceling the plan of anybody who signed up using spoofed locations. Nothing happened to anybody who signed up from a legal standpoint, as the only thing that happened was a canceled subscription. As a way to counter it in the future, the company started to require a local bank card to sign up, so you can consider that loophole effectively closed.
