When you raise prices,
what do you change alongside?

In a subscription business, a price increase is the surest lever for improving profit, and also the riskiest card to play. You are telling customers who already use the product that the same thing will now cost them more.

Netflix and Coupang each raised their subscription prices in Korea. Look less at the increases themselves and more at what each company put next to them, and it becomes clear what you actually have to decide when you raise prices.

1. What was the problem

The calculation a company faces when raising a subscription price is simple. Which is bigger: the revenue gained from the increase, or the revenue lost to churn?

The problem is that this calculation does not work well when you treat all customers as one group. Customers using the same service differ widely in willingness to pay. Someone who uses it every day can absorb an increase; someone who uses it twice a month starts thinking about cancelling over the same increase.

When a company running a single plan raises its price, it gives both groups the same single choice: keep paying, or leave.

2. What they actually changed

Netflix — built the lower tier first

• November 2022 Launched an ad-supported plan (KRW 5,500 per month in Korea)
• November 2023 Restricted account sharing and introduced a paid ‘extra member’ option (KRW 5,000 per person per month)
• December 2023 Stopped new sign-ups for the Basic plan, previously the cheapest ad-free option
• May 2025 Raised ad-supported from KRW 5,500 to KRW 7,000, and Basic (existing subscribers) from KRW 9,500 to KRW 12,000. Standard and Premium held flat

Look at the order: first open a cheap entry point, then close the cheapest ad-free option. The friction created by restricting account sharing was absorbed by a paid ‘extra member’ option. The price increase came after that structure had settled in.

Coupang WOW — bundled benefits, then raised the fee

• March 2024 Started unlimited free Coupang Eats delivery for WOW members
• April 2024 Announced a fee increase from KRW 4,990 to KRW 7,890 per month (new members from 13 April, existing members phased in from August)

Instead of splitting into tiers, Coupang widened the range of benefits bundled into one fee. On top of free shipping and returns and Coupang Play, it added free Coupang Eats delivery a month before announcing the increase. The announcement calculated that a member using all five benefits could save about KRW 970,000 a year.

3. What each structure aimed for — and what it cost

Neither company discloses figures for movement between plans or for churn. What follows is not an assessment of results, but the design intent and trade-offs that can be read from the published structures.

Netflix — turning cancellations into downgrades

If a price-sensitive customer drops to a cheaper tier instead of leaving, the revenue from that customer falls but does not go to zero. The ad-supported plan also creates a second revenue stream, advertising, alongside the subscription fee. It is a structure that earns from one customer in two ways.

The cost is the downgrade itself. When upper-tier customers move down, revenue per customer falls. If the lower tier is too attractive, it cancels out the effect of the increase. Where to put the difference between tiers — picture quality, simultaneous streams, or ads — is the real design decision.

Coupang — shifting the comparison from the fee to the bundle

Looked at on the fee alone, the increase is steep. But if customers compare it with ‘what would these bundled benefits cost separately,’ the math changes. Presenting an annual savings figure alongside it reads as a device to support that comparison. Changing what the price is compared with is a basic technique of price defence.

The cost is cost of delivery. If you justify an increase by adding benefits, your costs grow with those benefits. If the cost of the benefits eats into the increase, revenue goes up but profit does not rise by as much. And with a single-fee structure, there are not many cards left to play at the next increase.

Then — Coupang split into tiers too

What happened next is the interesting part. In 2025 Coupang Play opened ad-supported free viewing to regular members who are not WOW members, and around the same time ads started appearing on WOW members’ screens as well. In July 2026 it launched a ‘Premium Pass’ that WOW members pay extra for to remove ads. Inside the structure that had been bundled under a single fee, an ad-supported free tier and a paid upper tier had emerged. The card Netflix played first, Coupang played after raising its fee.

A price increase is a decision about structure before it is a change to a number. Along with the size of the increase, you have to design what sits next to it and what will be left for the next increase.

4. Where to look in your own company

The two cases differ in scale, but the points you have to decide on are the same.

What ROIGENT does in deal defence follows the same order. Before deciding how much to raise, we first work out which clusters your customers fall into and what each cluster is paying for. The size of the increase is the number that comes out after that calculation.

What to check before you raise prices

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