Netflix's cheapest plan is going the way of Quibi

Netflix users still on the company’s most affordable plan, currently known as Basic (not pejorative), might lose access to their $9.99 ad-free plan later this year. Per Vulture, in the company’s earnings report earlier today, Netflix said they have begun retiring the Basic plan in “ads countries, starting with Canada and the UK in Q2,” meaning people who were grandfathered into the plan will lose access this year.

This is all in hopes of “scaling our ads business, which “represents an opportunity to tap into significant new revenue and profit pools over the medium to longer term.” So to bolster that ad business, the company asks users to fork over more money or be forced into the humiliating position of watching The Gray Man with commercials. That is not the experience the Russo brothers spent $500 million crafting.

Netflix’s price increase has been going swimmingly. After booting all those free-loading password sharers from the platform last year, the company began offering monetized password sharing. The move was a boon for Netflix, which added six million paid subscribers. Now “paid sharing” is a “normal course of business” and enables Netflix “to more effectively penetrate” the 500 million connected TVs.

The company stopped offering the Basic plan last year, opting to begin moving people over to ad tiers. Currently, this will only boot those in the U.K. and Canada, but Vulture notes that those still on Basic in the U.S. shouldn’t be surprised if they lose access by the end of the year. As we reported last year, Basic was replaced by the $6.99 “Standard with ads” plan. Ad-free Netlfix begins at $15.49 a month ($7.99 for each extra member slot) and $19.99 for Premium, which gives users access to 4K streaming.

All told, Netflix is now expensive as hell. But if you want to watch WWE Monday Night Raw, well, that’s the only place to do it next year.