Discovery+'s Price Just Went Up — One Week After a $110 Billion Merger

On October 13, 2026, Discovery+ raised its US prices. The ad-supported plan went from $5.99 to $6.99 a month — a 17% increase — and the ad-free plan went from $9.99 to $11.99, up 20%, according to Cord Cutters News and The Hollywood Reporter. New subscribers pay the higher price immediately. Existing subscribers get 30 days' notice, with the new rate landing on billing statements dated November 12 or later, per Cord Cutters News' reporting.

Source: Cord Cutters News, The Hollywood Reporter, Oct 2026. US prices.

What closed exactly one week earlier

The timing isn't a coincidence of the calendar. On October 6, 2026, Paramount Skydance completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a report on the closing and the company's own SEC filing. WBD shareholders received $31.00 a share in cash, an equity value the filing puts at roughly $80.9 billion — a figure outlets commonly round up to around $110 billion once WBD's existing debt is included. The deal was eight months in the making: Paramount agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in February 2026 after outbidding Netflix, and a shareholder lawsuit pushed the close back before it finally went through. Discovery+'s new pricing is the first public pricing decision the combined company has made since the deal closed.

"Planned before the merger." Maybe. The last one wasn't a one-off.

A Skydance spokesperson told reporters the increase had been planned before the Warner Bros. Discovery deal closed and wasn't introduced because of it, a line repeated across The Desk's and Pocket-lint's coverage of the hike. That may well be true of this specific increase's timing. What the historical record shows, though, is that the previous time these two media libraries changed hands — when WarnerMedia and Discovery merged in 2022 to create the company Skydance just bought — the flagship service born from that deal raised its own ad-free price three separate times over the following three years, never by much at once.

Source: TechCrunch, Variety, PCWorld, Jan 2023–Oct 2025. The October 2025 increase also raised HBO Max's Basic-with-Ads tier to $10.99 and its Premium tier to $22.99.

None of that is proof that Discovery+, HBO Max, or Paramount+ will follow the exact same script this time. It's a base rate: the last time this particular corporate family absorbed a new streaming service, the ad-free price went up at every opportunity for three straight years, and no single increase was ever large enough on its own to look alarming.

What's left to combine

Skydance CEO David Ellison has said HBO Max and Paramount+ will eventually fold into a single app, though no timeline or price for a combined service has been announced, per The Desk. Discovery+'s own long-term fate under the new ownership is similarly unstated — executives haven't said whether it stays a standalone app, folds into the others, or disappears, per the same reporting. In the meantime, the merged company is carrying close to $80 billion in debt and has set a target of at least $6 billion in run-rate cost savings over three years, according to filings cited in coverage of the closing — the kind of backdrop that tends to put upward, not downward, pressure on whatever subscription prices end up under one roof.

What to actually do about it

None of this is something an individual subscriber can negotiate away — the Discovery+ increase is already in effect for new sign-ups and will reach existing subscribers automatically. A few things are still worth doing:

• If you have Discovery+, check your actual next billing date. The new price applies to statements dated November 12, 2026 or later — not necessarily your very next charge, depending on where your cycle falls.
• Watch HBO Max and Paramount+ over the next year, not just Discovery+. If the 2022 merger's pattern repeats, a price move on one or both of them is a matter of when, not if — and based on the history above, probably more than once.
• Treat "planned before the merger" as true but incomplete. The explanation addresses why this specific increase happened now. It says nothing about what a newly combined, heavily indebted media company does with its pricing over the next three years.

Streaming mergers keep producing the same pattern: a big corporate deal gets the headline, and the actual dollar impact shows up months or years later, one modest, individually-forgettable price increase at a time, spread across services that don't share a billing date or a notice period. That's exactly the kind of change that's easy to miss on any single statement and obvious only once you line several of them up.