Friendly reminder: The Netflix price-hike starts today. Here's what you need to know.
Nobody is really a fan of Netflix's rate increase, but if you've been holding off selling the children into slavery for the price hike, you might want to start hitting up Craigslist, because it's about to hit you hard. Thankfully, you've probably still got a little time before your bank account gets raped, which is why we put together a quick guide for what you need to do.
In case you missed the original news, Netflix is getting rid of its DVD and streaming combination plan and replacing it with two separate plans. The increase depends on what service you had, but it's essentially adding a $7.99 charge for streaming, then another charge for the tiers of the DVD plan, from $7.99 for one title at a time to $11.99 for two at a time and up.
First off, if you're going to cancel Netflix, here's a tip -- do it two days before your billing date. The rate increase doesn't go in affect until your next bill, so unless you signed up on the first of the month, you should be good to go. To find your bill date, log in to Netflix and click "Your Account & Help," the date should be listed in the middle column. The reason is pretty simple: Netflix doesn't credit you back for unused days, so you might as well get that Weeds marathon in while you still can.
If you do cancel, Netflix holds your account information and queue for two years; however, if you cancel just your DVD service and retain the streaming, it will delete your DVD queue entirely, so back that up. You can print it out, copy-and-paste the text elsewhere, or you can snag your own RSS feed (when you're logged in) and import the file in Excel or any other spreadsheet program. You'll have seven days to return those DVDs, so make sure you can find them buried under the entertainment center before you cancel. If you don't return them, you'll be charged $14 for each disc and $20 for each Blu-Ray.
Finally, log into your account and make sure you're not getting anything you don't want. Maybe you didn't even know you had the streaming service. If memory serves, it just appeared on our accounts magically a couple years ago as a free addition -- so cancel it if you're not using it. Perhaps you've been paying the extra for Blu-Ray -- cancel that, too, because, honestly, unless you have a 90-inch TV and 10/10 vision, most people can't tell the difference.
Or just fuck it. At the end of the day, it's still a hell of a service for a relatively cheap cost. If you're still complaining about it, you should probably move on, maybe try one of those Redbox things, or just claim you'll start torrenting all your movies instead -- until you realize how much of a pain it is to have the MPAA sending you emails all the time.
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