Streaming Service Fatigue Is Real and Here's What I'm Doing About It
I'm not proud of how long it took me to do the math.
Six streaming services. Six separate credit card charges rolling in every month like a slow-motion mugging. I'd scroll through three of them for forty-five minutes, land on something I'd already seen twice, and fall asleep watching it. Peak modern living.
The number that finally broke me? 1,049.28 a year. For the privilege of rewatching The Office for the fifth time and technically having access to the entire Disney vault that I never actually opened.
I snapped in February, when I was staring at my bank statement with that specific brand of horror usually reserved for check-engine lights and WebMD searches. Something had to give.
The Breakdown Nobody Wants to See
Let's just put the whole embarrassing thing on paper:
- Netflix: $15.49/month
- Hulu: $17.99/month
- Disney+: $13.99/month
- Max: $15.99/month
- Peacock: $13.99/month
- Apple TV+: $9.99/month
Total: $87.44/month.
For context, that's more than my electric bill. More than my gym membership. More than what I spend on groceries some weeks, which is its own problem, but still.
And here's the thing — I wasn't even using all of them. Peacock? I signed up for one specific show, watched it in four days, completely forgot to cancel, and kept paying for eight months like an absolute chump. Eight months. That's $111.92 for one show. I've paid less for concert tickets to see people I actually like.
Disney+ was in the same boat. I opened it probably six times in a year. Four of those times were to watch the same Pixar movie after I'd had a bad day. I'm a grown man paying fourteen dollars a month for comfort rewatches of animated fish movies. I'm not judging myself, but I'm also not not judging myself.
The Moment I Actually Did Something About It
There wasn't a dramatic intervention. No friend sat me down. I was just lying on my couch, scrolling through Max's interface (which, by the way, feels like it was designed by someone who has never used a TV), trying to find something to watch. Forty minutes later, I'd watched nothing. Zero entertainment consumed. I'd just been scrolling.
I did the math on my phone. Pulled up my bank statement, added it all up, and just said "oh, come on" to my empty apartment like it owed me an explanation.
I've been getting smarter about where my money goes — partly because I spent some time last year thinking hard about side hustle money and what it actually costs to earn extra income. When you've put real effort into making money, you start noticing how fast it evaporates on subscriptions you never think about. That math hits different.
So I made a plan.
The Rotation Strategy (This Actually Works)
The idea is stupidly simple, and I'm annoyed it took me this long to think of it.
Pick one or two services at a time. Watch everything you actually want to watch on them. Cancel. Move to the next one. Repeat.
Streaming services aren't going anywhere. The shows aren't leaving (mostly). There's no urgency to have everything running simultaneously. The urgency is manufactured by the services themselves to keep you subscribed during months when you're watching nothing.
Here's what my rotation looks like now:
One month, I'm on Netflix. I knock out whatever new stuff dropped, finish any series I was partway through, and move on. Next month, maybe Hulu for the new seasons of things I care about. The month after that, Max for a specific show I've been waiting on. Then maybe back to Netflix, because they've dropped three new things by then.
Total cost at any given time: 87. And I'm actually watching more intentionally because I know I only have one month before I'm switching. No more passive scrolling paralysis.
The thing nobody tells you is that most of these services let you cancel and resubscribe with no penalty. No minimum commitment, no cancellation fee, no angry retention call (well, sometimes a retention call, but you can just say no). The whole subscription model is built on people forgetting to cancel. Once you opt out of that dynamic, the game changes completely.
The Password Sharing Crackdown Changed the Calculus
This probably accelerated a lot of people's reckoning, including mine. Netflix and others cracking down on account sharing meant that the informal family subscriptions — where someone's cousin in Ohio was on the account, which meant the effective price per person was like $4 — all collapsed overnight.
Suddenly six people who were splitting one subscription had to get their own. And suddenly the math looked a lot worse for everyone.
I was sharing one account with two friends. When that ended, my effective cost roughly tripled. I wasn't going to triple my streaming spend without at least reconsidering the whole setup. And once I started reconsidering it, I couldn't stop.
Free Alternatives That Are Actually Good
Somewhere in my anti-subscription spiral, I remembered that free TV exists.
Tubi. Pluto TV. Peacock's free tier (which has a surprising amount of content). Even YouTube, which has full movies and series that I'd been ignoring because I associated it with ten-minute reaction videos and guy-with-a-microphone podcasts.
Tubi in particular is legitimately underrated. It's got movies I actually want to watch — not just the stuff that couldn't get distribution anywhere else. Yes, there are ads. I know. It's fine. I survived commercials for the first twenty-two years of my life and I can handle them again.
The library thing is real too, and I feel obligated to mention it even though it sounds like advice your aunt would give you.
The Library Card Rediscovery
My library has Libby. Libby has audiobooks, ebooks, and — this is the part that got me — streaming access through Kanopy. Free with a library card. Movies, documentaries, some TV. Not everything, obviously, but enough that I'm spending real time there instead of paying for it.
There's also Hoopla through the library, which has comics, movies, audiobooks, and music. Again, free. Again, I had no idea this existed at scale.
I've had a library card this whole time. It was sitting in a drawer. I was paying nine dollars a month for Apple TV+ and watching Ted Lasso twice while a perfectly good free streaming service existed thirty feet away, metaphorically speaking.
What I Actually Kept
One. I kept one service permanently.
Netflix. Because it's the one I actually use consistently, it's got the widest library, and my entire household is on it. At $15.49 a month, it's a reasonable entertainment cost. That's fine. I can live with that.
Everything else is in the rotation. Some months I add a second service for a specific show. Most months it's just Netflix and Tubi and the library and my dignity.
What Actually Changed
My monthly streaming spend went from 15 and 25 on average. That's a savings of over 720 a year.
What's changed beyond the money: I actually watch things now instead of scrolling. When you only have one or two services, the decision fatigue collapses. There's less to choose from, which means you choose faster and actually watch the thing.
I've also rediscovered that not every evening needs to be a streaming event. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I play a game. Sometimes I just go to bed at a normal time like a person who has his life together. If you're looking for something actually worth watching with one of those freed-up evenings, here are 15 sports documentaries that are genuinely better than 90% of what's on any streaming service.
The streaming companies built an ecosystem designed to have you signed up for everything simultaneously, paying passively, feeling vaguely guilty about not watching more. Breaking out of that isn't revolutionary. It's just paying attention.
And maybe don't wait until you're staring at an eighty-seven dollar monthly charge before you do the math.
