End the pricing tricks. Just combine Disney+ and Hulu already | usagoldmines.com

Disney doesn’t seem to think too highly of its individual Disney+ and Hulu subscribers.

That’s the only explanation for its latest price hikes, which largely eliminate any reason to pay for either service separately. Oh, Disney will still let you do it, but you’ll only be saving 50 cents per month versus the bundle of Disney+ and Hulu together. The a la carte route is a rip-off by design, intended to make Disney’s bundles look more attractive.

If Disney had a little more respect for its customers, it would just end this charade and combine Disney+ and Hulu already. Instead, it’s made the cynical calculation that the appearance of a deal is better for business.

Disney’s latest price hikes

See if you can spot the pattern in Disney’s September 2026 price hikes:

• Disney+ (with ads): $11.99 → $12.49/mo.
• Hulu (with ads): $11.99 → $12.49/mo.
• Disney+ and Hulu bundle (with ads): Still $12.99/mo.
• Disney+ (no ads): $18.99 → $21.49/mo.
• Hulu (no ads): $18.99 → $21.49/mo.
• Disney+ and Hulu bundle (no ads): $19.99 → $21.99/mo.

(If you’re bundling Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max, those prices quietly ticked upward this week as well. The trio rose from $19.99 to $21.99 per month with ads, or $32.99 to $34.99 without. The cost of Hulu + Live TV also rose from $90 to $100 per month when bundled with Disney+, Hulu on-demand, and ESPN Unlimited.)

With the new pricing, paying for just Disney+ or Hulu is a mere 50 cents per month cheaper than combining them, down from $1 per month savings previously. While Disney has obviously been pushing customers toward bundles for some time, the latest price hikes squeeze the a la carte savings down to farcical levels.

The Hulu-Disney+ merger plan

Disney has already made clear its intention to mash Disney+ and Hulu into a single app. If you subscribe to both services, you can now access most of Hulu’s catalog through Disney+, with an option to sync your Hulu profile to port over your watchlist and viewing history.

And while Disney has not committed to a timeline for discontinuing the Hulu app, it’s become an afterthought as the company pushes people over to the Disney+ experience. One employee told Business Insider‘s James Faris that Hulu’s app is now “on life support, with no active development.”

Strangely, though, Disney has insisted that it will keep selling standalone Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions, even if Hulu’s app goes away. With the latest price hikes, you have to wonder why it would even bother.

The charitable view is that Disney doesn’t want to push happy Hulu subscribers out of their current subscriptions and into an unfamiliar app. It also hasn’t ported Hulu’s live TV service into Disney+ yet, so it can’t wind down Hulu’s own app until that happens.

But I propose a more cynical explanation: By keeping individual Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions around, Disney gets to crow about the savings you get from combining them. Never mind that those inflated savings come from pushing standalone prices to comical levels, or that bundle pricing continues to rise as well. Instead, Disney can point to the value of getting two services basically for the price of one.

The bundle savings are a ruse

Sadly this outcome was predictable a couple of years ago, as more streamers started bundling their services together. It was easy to see then how standalone prices would rise at much faster rate than bundled pricing, giving customers the feeling of getting a deal even if it’s on services they don’t really want.

It’s similar to the playbook that Disney and others followed in their move to ad-supported streaming. While they initially pitched these plans as a way to bring down prices, all they really did was turn ad-free streaming into a bigger luxury, with prices rising at a faster rate than their ad-supported plans.

If Disney wanted to do right by its standalone subscribers, it would combine Disney+ and Hulu and automatically grant customers access to both. The company would even waive the 50-cent surcharge for existing subscribers, at least until the next inevitable round of price hikes. The cost to the company would be minimal, and it would even serve the larger goal of moving more people into the Disney+ app, ultimately reducing operating expenses and subscriber churn.

Instead, Disney has opted to treat its standalone customers like rubes, with a la carte pricing that serves no purpose beyond making its bundles look better.

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