Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown is here — and it costs $7.99 a month

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Netflix is ​​about to kick your best friend out of your account—unless you pay them to share your account, that is. Tuesdays, Netflix revealed Details on how its crackdown on password sharing will affect viewers in the US and how much it will cost to have additional people on your account.

If you have the Netflix Standard plan which costs $15.49 per month, you option is Adding an additional member who can use the service outside your home for an additional $7.99 per month. Anyone who pays for the Netflix Premium package with 4K streaming has the option of adding up to two additional members, but it will still cost $7.99 each. The US isn’t the only country implementing new rules Netflix will charge UK subscribers £4.99 per month for additional member slots.

Netflix subscribers to its two cheapest plans (Basic or Standard with ads, which cost $9.99 and $6.99 per month, respectively) don’t have the option of adding additional members to their account.

According to the blog post, Netflix subscribers in the US who share the service “outside their home” will get an email starting Tuesday about the company’s password-sharing policies.

Image: Netflix

Netflix’s paid password-sharing experiments have been happening for some time, and it expanded its tests to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain in February. Password-sharing Crackdown was originally supposed to hit the US earlier this year, but the company pushed that launch back again to April.

A Support page explaining the new setup describes “additional members” as anyone who will have their own password and profile, paid for by the person who “invited” them to join. Additional member accounts also have their own restrictions. They have to be activated in the same country, they can only watch or download content on one device at a time, and they can’t create additional profiles or log in as a Kids profile.

your netflix family, according to the company, is set based on where you watch Netflix on the TV and what IP address the device uses. That location can be reset using the app on the TV or TV-connected device by verifying or updating your home and responding to a verification link sent to the account’s listed email address or phone number.

Netflix,

We use information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether a device signed in to your account is part of your Netflix family.

We do not collect GPS data to attempt to determine the exact physical location of your devices.

If a Netflix household isn’t set up, we’ll automatically set one up for you based on IP address, device ID, and account activity.

You can always update your Netflix family from TV by connecting to your internet and following the steps above.

Netflix used to be very pro-password sharing — in March 2017, it famously tweeted, “Love is sharing a password.” (That tweet, at the time of this writing, still up.) But in early 2022, it plans to end the practice and begin testing ways to pay people for accounts that use Netflix outside the account owner’s household.

Image: Netflix

In April 2022, the company revealed that it lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, and said at the time that more than 100 million households were getting Netflix through password sharing.

As it tries to turn that customer growth around, cracking down on password sharing is just one of many levers the company has pulled. It also introduced an advertising scheme that has around 5 million global active users and has invested heavily in games as an added benefit for customers.

Update May 23rd, 7:24PM ET: couple UK pricing,

Disclosure: ledge Recently made a series with Netflix.