Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Last year, Max announced its intent to start enforcing its rules against sharing account credentials.
- After a few months of warnings, the service will now make subscribers pay $8 a month to share their account.
- You’re limited to a single “Extra Member Add-On” outside your home.
Without fail, streaming services are only getting more expensive. And with so many complicated agreements between content creators and distributors constantly changing where you can stream what, it can feel like the only way to have your bases covered is to just subscribe to them all. With as much as that costs, plenty of us are tempted to bend break the rules and share some of those account credentials with friends and family — and maybe get a few of theirs to use, in return. If you’ve been doing that with Max, though, we’ve got some bad news for you.
Today Warner Bros. Discovery announces that Max is joining peers like Netflix and Disney Plus with charging an “Extra Member Add-On” fee for viewers outside the primary household. You can only add one per account, and the privilege will cost you just about $8 a month.
While we already hear you collectively sighing out there, it’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. Besides the general industry-wide crackdown on password sharing, Warner Bros. Discovery explicitly announced that it would be getting serious about shared Max accounts at some point in 2025, and following the past few months of gentle warnings, that other shoe is finally dropping.
Times are tough all over for people trying to save a buck on accessing media. Just last month Plex announced a controversial Plex Price price hike for sharing your own private media library, effectively doubling the cost of some of its subscription offerings. Maybe it’s time to think about putting that OTA antenna back up?
