Streamflation is quietly draining your account, and your brain is letting it happen
Streaming prices keep creeping up. Here's the mental trick that stops you from noticing, and what to do about it.
The price of watching TV keeps going up
The Guardian reports that an estimated 39% of Americans cancelled a streaming service in the past six months because of what’s now being called “streamflation.” Prices keep rising, ads keep multiplying, and quality keeps slipping. Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, Apple TV, and others have all raised their prices, some repeatedly. The Guardian reports that accessing the six major streaming services now costs subscribers somewhere in the neighbourhood of 120 a month, before you even pay for the broadband you need to run them.
That’s a real number. And honestly, most people have no idea they’re spending it.
Why you don’t feel it
Here’s the thing about small monthly charges: your brain does not treat them like real money.
This is mental accounting, a concept developed by the economist Richard Thaler. The idea is that we don’t hold money in one big mental pot. We sort it into separate mental buckets, almost like envelopes. And the bucket labelled “subscriptions” gets very little attention, because each line item feels tiny on its own.
A couple of bucks more per month for Disney+? Barely registers. A few dollars more for Peacock? You shrug and move on. But those small bumps stack up across multiple services, month after month, and the total in that mental envelope quietly swells without you ever consciously deciding to spend more.
The Guardian reports that the annual price for Disney+ at launch was 70. Now it’s 190, an increase of 170%. That is not a small change. But because it arrived in slow increments, spread across years, it probably never felt like a decision. It just happened.
The boiling frog version of your finances
You know that old image of a frog in water that’s warming up degree by degree? That’s exactly what’s going on here. Each individual price hike is below your threshold for action. Your brain files it as background noise, not a choice worth making. So you never actually choose to spend more. The spending just grows, unexamined, in the background.
This is sometimes called the ostrich effect, named by researchers Galai and Sade: we avoid looking at financial information that might be uncomfortable. But honestly, with subscriptions it’s even simpler than that. There’s nothing dramatic enough to look at. No single moment of pain. Just a slow, invisible creep.
And if you’re self-employed, this matters more than it does for someone on a salary. Your income can shift month to month. Your expenses need to be things you’ve actually chosen, not things that drifted in while you weren’t watching.
The mental accounting problem underneath all of it
Here’s what Thaler’s idea really helps us see. When you pay for something monthly, it stops feeling like spending. It becomes infrastructure, like electricity. You stop auditing it the way you’d audit a one-off purchase.
But subscriptions are not electricity. They’re discretionary. And streaming companies, The Guardian reports, are well aware that raising prices gradually is less likely to trigger cancellations than one large jump. The slow drip is the strategy. Your mental accounting is what makes that strategy work.
The Guardian also reports that Netflix hasn’t raised its prices since March 2026, and frames that not as a break for consumers but as a signal that another hike is coming. The services are not finished. The water is still warming.
One small thing to do this week
Open your bank or card statement and look only at recurring subscription charges. Don’t judge them yet. Just write them all down in one place, as a single list with a total at the bottom.
That’s it. Just make the number visible.
You’re not committing to cancelling anything. You’re just moving the money out of its separate mental envelope and putting it in front of your eyes as one real figure. That single act disrupts the mental accounting effect, because you can’t unconsciously file things away once you’ve seen the whole pile.
What you do with the information is up to you. If you want proper guidance on how your fixed costs sit alongside your variable self-employed income, that’s a conversation for a qualified financial planner in your country.
If this rang a bell
The way we mentally organise money, or fail to, shapes almost every financial habit we have. If you’d like to understand more of that stuff in plain terms, the Finance Fridays newsletter is where I break it down each week, free, no jargon. You can sign up at Way of Wealth.
Or if you want to go deeper and actually work through your own patterns with support, The Money Story Method is a 12-week one-to-one programme designed for self-employed people exactly like you. Get in touch and we can talk about whether it’s the right fit.
Source: The Guardian
Joel