I cancelled my Netflix subscription a month ago. I was barely watching anything over the last few years. It made no financial sense to keep the subscription.

I signed up for Netlfix in early 2020 with the mobile-only plan that was available here in India. It was not full-HD but that was okay. This plan costs around ₹199 (less than $3 in 2020) per month. That amount was not insignificant to me back then; it took me days to decide whether I should splurge on this. But what is life without a little entertainment?

The show that made me to sign up was Friends. At the time it was only available on Netflix. I might not have signed up then if it wasn’t for that. And nope, sailing the seven seas in search of entertainment is not my thing.

My naïve plan was to binge-watch all 10 seasons of that show during the 30-day trial period, and then cancel the subscription. I ended up keeping the subscription for nearly 6 more years.

As I was contemplating on my Netflix journey, I realized that it’s also a case study in ironies.

Towards the end of 2021 I was watching at least one movie a week. Sometimes even two. Therefore I decided to upgrade to the ₹499 plan which would give me full-HD and the ability to watch on bigger screens.

However, some complications emerged after I upgraded. The best display I had was the one on my smartphone. The big screens I had available at the time were my 14" ThinkPad (running Linux), and a 24" Dell Monitor. My ThinkPad had a terrible display – the colors look washed out. It’s only good for writing and running code. My Dell monitor was better but it was placed in my home office which was not a cosy place to enjoy a movie. This resulted in me watching less movies than I did when I was on the inferior mobile-only plan. That’s irony number 1.

Second, I wrote and deployed a Laravel application – Flixtick – to track my movie watching habits because I had been watching a lot of movies. Flixtick is currently just a glorified list. A spreadsheet would have sufficed, but I had a roadmap in mind where I’ll start simple and add sophisticated features gradually. But because I wasn’t watching much movies due to the display conundrum, I did not have anything to track. Therefore I lost interest in it. Along with cancelling my Netflix subscription, I also cancelled the DigitalOcean droplet that hosted Flixtick, to which I was spending nearly $5 every month. I will not be renewing the domain of that website.

Third, I kept putting off watching the few supposedly great Netflix-produced content. My thinking was that unlike other titles which may disappear from Netflix, the Netflix-produced content would always be there to watch at my convenience. That convenience is gone after I unsubscribed.

Other reasons for reducing my Netflix consumption include busier work and the lack of compelling content. I preferred to watch shorter more informative videos on YouTube. I watched barely 20 movies during the last 3 years. None of them stick out. Spending ₹6000 to watch less than 7 movies a year made no financial sense. That’s enough money to buy petrol for a month.

Netflix is the most expensive OTT platform I know of. To put things in perspective, here are the pricing for the annual plans of popular OTT services in India as of 18 January 2026.

Platform	Quality	Annual Cost
Netflix	1080p	₹5988
Amazon Prime	4K	₹1499
JioHotstar	4K	₹1499
SonyLIV	4K	₹1499
Zee5	4K	₹2099

(I found the pricing through a quick google search; I do not use most of these products).

The prices shown are for the plans that allow you to watch on at least 1 big screen in atleast 1080p resolution without ads. Netflix is in a different league. Without 4K. Without as much local content as most of the other players.

But that is not to say it was completely terrible. The Netflix app itself is great. I discovered and watched so many great movies and series on Netflix, including even in languages I don’t speak, such as Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and many more. Netflix played a part in me maintaining my sanity during the COVID-19 pandemic period.