Is Disney+, Hulu, Max Bundle Really That Good of a Deal? Here’s How to Make the Most of It
This new bundle will still save you money, but not as much as the companies behind it want you to think.
As media companies continue to search for ways to remain profitable as cord-cutting continues to wreak havoc on their previously time-tested revenue models, one of the ways that many believe they will be able to combat the tides of consumer cost-cutting is via bundles. The details of the newest inter-streamer bundle were released on Thursday as Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are uniting Disney+, Hulu, and Max into a single bundle for $16.99 or $29.99 per month, what the companies tout as a 38% discount over subscribing to each individually. However, as with all marketing materials, if you look at the particulars a little more closely, it might not actually be that good of a deal.
Key Details:
- The new Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle will cost $16.99 per month for ad-supported and $29.99 for ad-free.
- The companies are promoting this as a 38% discount compared to signing up for each individually.
- Disney has long offered a bundle of Disney+ and Hulu making it highly unlikely anyone was subscribing to Disney+ and Hulu separately.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle does still provide savings, but in a world in which the Disney Bundle has been the focal point of the House of Mouse’s streaming strategy for well over a year, comparing this new bundle’s price with subscribing to each service individually feels a tad disingenuous.
New customers coming to Disney+ are greeted with opportunities to add Hulu on practically every screen, and the same is true for new Hulu subscribers. Disney’s goal has been to make the various interactions of the Disney Bundle too good to pass up. So, if someone was going to sign up for either ad-supported Disney+ or Hulu on their own at $7.99 per month, the chances seem pretty good that they would opt to pay $2 more monthly for the Duo Basic ad-supported Disney Bundle tier for $9.99 per month.
So, if we use that as the baseline for the ad-supported plan on the new bundle with Max, it’s looking like less of a slam-dunk deal, and more like a decent, but moderate savings. The ad-supported level of WBD’s flagship streamer also costs $9.99 monthly, meaning that if you had all three streamers before this bundle, you were paying $19.98 every month.
Therefore, the $2.99 monthly savings that the Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle offers is nothing to sneeze at, but it is closer to 15% savings than it is 38%. For a full year subscribed to both, the savings would be $35.88.
However, the interesting quirk in this new bundle announcement is that it seems to be bucking a recent trend in streaming. Due to the fact that entertainment companies have been able to generate more revenue from ad-supported plans than ad-free (thanks to being able to earn on subscription costs and ad sales), they have been not so slowly, but definitely surely making it less and less attractive to pay to go ad-free. But that does not appear to be the case here.
Again going back to the existing Disney Bundle for comparison purposes; the company’s Duo Premium provides Disney+ and Hulu ad-free. That bundle costs $19.99 per month. On the WBD side, Max’s Ad-Free plan runs $16.99 monthly, bringing the price for the two plans to $36.98 — if you legitimately signed up for each individually, you would pay $48.97. The corresponding ad-free plan on the Disney-WBD bundle costs $29.99 (exactly what The Streamable's expert David Satin predicted in May), meaning that customers will save $6.99 every month (or $83.88 if they remain subscribed for a full year). That savings comes out to just about 19%, less than half of what Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are promoting.
Nonetheless, the ad-free deal is notably better, both in terms of percentage and actual dollars. While that might be easily explained as a weird happenstance of how the bundles are constructed, companies like Disney and WBD rarely make moves of this nature without some overarching strategy. Therefore, if they want to push people toward the more expensive ad-free tier, perhaps they are seeing declines on the ad-sales front, making it less profitable to push the ad-supported plans.
Of course, cost is not the only benefit of streaming bundles. Combining subscriptions for multiple streaming services into a single bill and profile makes managing your accounts much easier. While one of the major benefits of streaming is being able to cancel (and resubscribe) to services at any time, having to bounce back and forth between services, remember different emails and passwords, and keep up with individual billing cycles can be increasingly frustrating when you are simply trying to manage your spending habits. Bundles like this one eliminate a significant portion of that headache by putting everything you need to cancel, upgrade, or downgrade your subscription into one convenient location.
So, if you are looking to sign up for the new Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle and want to get the best bang for your buck, then — in this increasingly rare occasion — you will get the best deal by choosing the ad-free option.
Disney+ Hulu Max Bundle
Get 3 great streaming services at a 34-38% discount with the Disney+ Hulu Max Bundle. You’ll get family-friendly favorites, blockbuster movies, live sports, and the best dramas on TV. Sign up and stream the biggest hits from Disney, HBO, FX, Pixar, The Muppets, Star Wars, and Marvel. It’s an enormous library of TV and movies and one of the best values in streaming.