The streaming industry has spent the last few years teaching customers a dangerous lesson: Loyalty does not pay. Sign up early, stay subscribed, watch regularly, build the app into your household’s entertainment routine — and what do you get? Another annual price hike, maybe two if the service in question is feeling pressure to improve its balance sheet before the next earnings disclosure.

It is now essentially a foregone conclusion that once a year, practically every streamer you subscribe to is going to send an email that says something along the lines of, “In order to continue providing you the high-quality entertainment experience you have grown to love, the price of your subscription will go up effective on your next bill.”

That might make sense on a quarterly earnings call, but it is terrible relationship management, especially in an environment where competition abounds, and the financial demands on families are increasing at every turn. Over the past decade, we have seen streaming go from the low-cost, streamlined alternative to the bloated, increasingly expensive cable bundle to essentially the very thing that it was designed to replace.

If streaming services want to retain — or even regain — any of the goodwill that they once had, they should try something radical: lock in a customer’s monthly price for as long as they remain subscribed. Or, if that feels too aggressive, guarantee the price for five years. At the end of that term, move the customer to the then-current rate and lock that in for another five years. No annual surprises. No “we’re giving you more value” emails that somehow always cost $2 more per month. No making your best customers feel like suckers for sticking around.

The logic is not complicated. It costs companies far more to convince a customer to subscribe (or resubscribe) than it does to keep an existing one happy. And price concerns are by far the largest reason that people cancel their streaming subscriptions.

With customer acquisition getting even more expensive in today’s digital era, it would behoove streaming companies to do whatever they can to keep consumers signed up for as long as possible. When it comes to streaming-specific research, studies indicate that once a user stays signed up with a platform for one year, they are half as likely to cancel. So, yes, there is an economic tradeoff at play with this proposal, but the alternative is for platforms to have to continually spend money to convince customers to come back year over year.

Despite my obvious customer bias, the idea of getting people to pay less, but more often, seems to make sense for streaming services. Churn is one of the industry’s defining problems; the simplicity of canceling a service is a feature for the consumer, but a bug for the provider. Last year, premium subscription video on-demand (SVOD) services had an average monthly churn rate of 4%, and 30% of streaming cancellations were due to price concerns. Since Netflix has an estimated 325 million global subscribers, that means that it lost 13 million households per month last year. 13 million every 30 days! Netflix, and all other streamers, are spending billions on content, marketing, live sports, and bundles to bring subscribers in, then unceremoniously kicking them out with a never-ending assault of price increases.

Price hikes are always annoying, but the practice is especially frustrating because other industries already understand the appeal of a price-lock promise. Cell phone companies, internet providers, satellite TV operators, and many others have all used some version of guaranteed pricing, promotional lock-ins, or loyalty rates to make customers feel like staying put has value. Now, it goes without saying that those industries aren’t exactly known for being altruistic and uniquely consumer-friendly, so there has to be a significant financial benefit to the practice. It seems that streaming has learned what their business brethren have: that having a reliable subscriber pool that they can bank on is good for their bottom lines, and good for the subscribers as well. It’s far past time that streaming services realize that there is value in consistency.

Imagine Netflix telling subscribers, “Your price is locked as long as you remain subscribed.” Or Disney+ offering five-year rate protection to customers who keep their Disney Bundle active. What if Peacock said that if you sign up before the Olympic Summer Games, your price will stay the same until after the next Summer Games?

That would not just reduce cancellations; it would give streamers a real marketing hook to bring in even more customers. Customers who know that canceling means losing their locked-in rate would think twice before rotating out for a few months. Then, with a consistent subscription available to them, they can more fully explore the streamer’s library, catch up on earlier seasons of ongoing originals, and get excited for upcoming events and releases; essentially, because they have been incentivized to stick around for longer periods of time, those consumers have a much higher probability of becoming the exact type of users that streamers not only crave, but rely on. Users who incorporate a platform into their regular streaming habits make it even more difficult for them to cancel if/when their locked-in price eventually increases.

The move would also give new subscribers an incentive to sign up sooner rather than later. The services would still be free to raise prices for new customers, introduce premium tiers, sell annual plans, create bundles, and monetize ad-supported users. But they would stop alienating the people who have already made the commitment to be onboard. If a platform adds a tier or plan that is more attractive to a longtime customer, then the service should find a way to prorate the new cost to account for the promised price-lock. If a user is loyal to a service, the service should be loyal to the user.

All too often, we hear people complain that all of the perks go to new customers. And from an acquisition standpoint, that makes sense, but loyalty programs are supposed to reward loyalty, and it feels like this is the next natural step for the streaming industry, but currently, the streaming model often does the opposite. It trains customers to churn, wait for a deal, come back for one show, cancel again, and repeat the cycle. Nearly 45% of customers who cancel a streaming service resubscribe within a year, which proves that many subscribers are not gone forever; they are simply behaving rationally in a market that has made commitment feel optional, but a price lock would make commitment feel valuable. It would save customers money in the long term, while also making companies money in the months that the customers would otherwise have been canceled.

The Streaming Wars are no longer about who can grab the most subscribers at any cost. They are about who can build a durable, profitable, loyal customer base and then keep them engaged for as long as possible. The easiest way to do that is not greenlighting another expensive original series, paying billions in another sports rights deal, or partnering with myriad of streamers for another bundle. Sometimes, it is just telling customers that the longer they stay, the better deal they get. In streaming, as in life, people are far more likely to go — and stay — where they feel valued. It’s time that streaming companies give customers a reason to feel like they belong.