Just as the much-anticipated 11th season of hit travel competition series “Jet Lag: The Game” takes flight on Nebula, the indie streamer will be implementing its first-ever major price increase on Sept. 1.
Major is of course relative, because the creator-owned streamer, which is currently priced at $5 per month and $50 annually, will be hiking its fee by a whopping $1 to reach $6 per month and $60 annually, in comparison to the cost of Netflix, Max and the similar mega streamers that have also recently undergone a round of price increases.
Nebula also offers one specific deal its those much larger streamers don’t: specialized codes promoted by Nebula creators in their content that give a 40% discount on that new annual membership price down to $36.
And all of these changes only apply to new subscribers, as Nebula says it will continue to honor the current rate for existing customers — and rolled out that info Aug. 1 in order to give non-customers ample time to get their lower membership rates locked in.
But a price increase is a price increase, no matter how small, and Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus has an explanation behind the business decision and why it will only apply to new customers.
First, it’s important to note that when Nebula launched in 2019, it was offered as a standalone subscription or through a bundle with then-partner Curiosity Stream. That deal was phased out more than a year and a half ago, and the standalone pricing for Nebula has not changed since.
“There’s a few things at play here. One is our price hasn’t really changed much since we launched,” Wiskus told Variety. “There’s been a couple of changes, but for so long, we were part of this bundle. In the era of us being our own thing, for the last year and a half, we haven’t seen a price increase, and a lot of that was us feeling out the relationship with the subscribers. Seeing, do people stay signed up? What are the marketing dynamics? What are the audience retention dynamics? What happens when we start adding more prestige content and do bigger original productions? And what we’ve seen, one of the most common requests we get is, is there a way we can pay you more? No joke, we get this question through our support all the time. People ask if there’s a way they can pay us more. And I think that it comes down to, unlike the big streamers, the dynamic for us with the audience is they want to support the creators. They want to support this business venture that the creators have gotten together and embarked on. They’re here for us, not just the stuff that’s being made. And when we look at the value increase of Nebula over the last couple of years — the new creators that we’ve added, we’re over 200 creators now, the original productions were going bigger and bigger with the originals, we’re trying more audacious things, we’re moving into more prestige television-style formats — what the subscriber gets for the money, the value has gone up.”
Wiskus isn’t exaggerating: Over the past year, Nebula has significantly increased its content offering and production pipeline, launched a movie studio and struck partner deals with Morning Brew and Spotify. Noteworthy recent and upcoming titles from Nebula include, “Jet Lag: The Game” Season 11, “Identiteaze,” “Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend” from “House of the Dragon” Season 2 newcomer Abigail Thorn, “17 Pages,” “Boomers,” “The Getaway” and “The Dinner Plan,” just to name a few.
“And to bring us a little bit more in line with what a streaming service of our level, relatively, would cost and should cost, being respectful to the audience and thinking through us wanting to expand and do more things, investing more to create more things, to provide more value to the subscribers — it just seems like sooner or later, inflation is going to catch up,” Wiskus said. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to make changes. And we wanted to think through not just what making a change looks like now, but what are our policies around making changes? How do we explain it to the customers? What is that conversation like? How transparent can we be? And so the idea here is to make a small change, to telegraph how we make changes, and to kind of bring us in line with inflation and the value that we’re providing.”
Wiskus also notes he has no plans of increasing the price for current Nebula subscribers in the near future — and hopes they never have to at all. And he’s tried to make this stance very clear through direct communication with his customers ahead of the September price increase.
“It would take a lot for us to raise rates for existing subscribers,” Wiskus wrote on response to a subscriber’s question related to the coming price increase on the Nebula sub-Reddit page last week. “The plan is to grow so much that the percentage of people on the old pricing just isn’t worth the hassle of annoying them. But, legally speaking, never say never.”
