Netflix has now removed its free trial, meaning you have to become a subscriber to watch paid shows or you won't be able to access the platform. Given that the site is at the top of the streaming services when it comes to original content, it's a smart business decision — even if it doesn't do consumers any favors.
It's not exactly clear when Netflix made this change, but the fact remains that if you don't already have a subscription to the service, you can't try it out. The famous streaming service is telling us to "pay up or you won't be able to watch shows like The Haunting of Bly Manor, or Tiger King, or whatever else is popular on the platform right now."
If you change your region on the help page, you can see that this Netflix policy remains the same for most major countries, and it states that free trials are not available in Japan, the UK, Canada, and Australia. The only place we were able to find a free trial of the platform available to the public was Afghanistan.
To test Netflix's new policy, we created a new account and found that there's no option for a free trial of any length—once you sign up, you have to choose a plan and there's no option for a free trial. Netflix doesn't even mention this during the sign-up process.
We wondered if Netflix's decision to remove trials from its platform was an attempt to weed out users who take advantage of free trials with multiple email. There's certainly a segment of users who do, and given the number of streaming services out there, you could probably enjoy weeks of content from a single account with every free trial that companies offer to attract new users.
Since Netflix is now full of new content, it's probably the best time to get rid of the platform's free trial and switch to a regular subscription.
So, if you didn't already know, Netflix plans start at $8.99 and you can cancel them at any time.
