Three Subscriptions That Just Got More Expensive — and What to Do About It
Microsoft 365, YouTube Premium, and Tidal all raised prices in July 2026. Here's the smart family response to each hike.
Three subscription bills quietly got bigger this month — and if you haven't noticed yet, you will when the next statement arrives.
Microsoft 365 family plans ticked up on 1 July. YouTube Premium's family price jumped to €26.99 back in April and has been slowly landing in European inboxes ever since. And Tidal just announced its family plan is rising from €16.99 to €21.99 on 3 August. That's three separate services, three separate emails you may have missed, and somewhere between €5 and €10 more leaving your account every single month.
Here's what families should actually do about each one.
Microsoft 365: Check Whether Your Family Plan Still Makes Sense
Microsoft's July 2026 price increase is the company's biggest commercial pricing update since 2022. Consumer family plans (covering up to six people) crept up alongside the business tiers, so even households paying a personal or family subscription are affected.
Before you just accept the new price, spend two minutes answering these questions:
How many people actually use it? A Microsoft 365 Family plan is great value if four to six people are actively using Word, Excel, and 1TB of OneDrive storage each. If it's really just one or two of you, the Personal plan (one person, five devices) is significantly cheaper.
Are you paying for OneDrive storage you don't need? Many families upgraded to Microsoft 365 primarily for the 1TB cloud storage, then realised they're storing photos there and paying for Google Photos or iCloud separately. Check SubManager's spending breakdown — you may be covering the same backup twice.
Could you switch to a cheaper productivity suite? Google Workspace's free tier covers most families' document and spreadsheet needs. It's not a perfect swap, but for households who only occasionally open Office files, it's worth considering.
YouTube Premium: The Maths on Ads vs. No Ads Has Changed
YouTube Premium's family plan now costs €26.99 per month for up to six accounts. That's €324 a year — roughly the same as three months of a decent streaming service.
The question isn't whether YouTube Premium is good (it is). The question is whether it's worth it at that price for your family.
Some honest maths: YouTube now serves an average of five ads per break on non-Premium video. If you or your kids are watching an hour of YouTube daily, you're skipping roughly 20–25 minutes of ads a week per person. Multiply that across a family of four and you're talking about an hour and a half of combined ad-skipping time each week — probably worth something, but maybe not €27 a month worth.
Here's what to try: drop to an individual plan for the biggest YouTube watcher in the house, and let the rest of the family use the free tier for a month. Most people are surprised how quickly they readjust to ads, especially on a TV where you can wander off during the break. If it's genuinely unbearable for everyone, reinstate the family plan knowing you tried.
SubManager will send you a price-change notification when that individual plan renews — set it up so you don't drift back to the family tier without meaning to.
Tidal: The August Deadline You Should Act On Now
Tidal's family plan rises from €16.99 to €21.99 on 3 August 2026. That's a 30% increase, which is steep by anyone's measure.
Tidal's main selling points are lossless audio quality and a strong jazz, classical, and hip-hop catalogue. If your household has at least two people who care deeply about audio quality, the family plan post-hike might still be competitive against Spotify's family tier (currently around €17.99). But if music is background noise for most of your family, this is the moment to ask a harder question.
Before 3 August, do this: Log into Tidal and check the "listening history" for each family member on the plan. You may find that two out of four people haven't opened Tidal in three months. Cancel before the hike and save €21.99 a month.
If you want to stay, it's worth calling or chatting with Tidal's support before the increase lands — services facing subscriber churn around price increases will often offer a retention discount to long-term customers. Mentioning you're considering cancelling is not rude; it's just smart.
The Pattern Behind All Three Hikes
There's a consistent playbook subscription services use when raising prices: announce it via email in language designed not to alarm you ("We're updating our pricing to continue delivering great value..."), give you 30–45 days' notice, and let the billing cycle roll over before most subscribers notice.
2026 has seen more of these quiet rollovers than any year since streaming went mainstream. Add up the increases from Netflix, Disney+, Microsoft, YouTube, and Tidal over the past 18 months and many families are paying €120–180 more per year for the same services.
The antidote is simple: know the exact moment a charge changes amount. That's not something the services are going to make easy for you, but SubManager's price-alert feature flags the instant a subscription bills at a different amount than last time — giving you a week to decide whether to stay, downgrade, or cancel before the habit of paying sets in.
What to Do This Week
You don't need to cancel everything. You just need to spend 10 minutes on this before the August Tidal deadline:
- Open your subscription list and note the current price for Microsoft 365, YouTube Premium, and Tidal.
- For each one, ask: how many family members actively use it, and is there a cheaper tier that would cover most of what they need?
- Set a price-alert in SubManager for all three — so the next time any of them changes, you hear about it before the charge lands.
Three services, three opportunities to save. Some of that money is probably better spent elsewhere.