Annual arithmetic is the only comparison that survives contact with a renewal date. Our 12-month plan is $10 a month, which is $120 charged once, and there is a $5 trial for 24 hours if you want to test capacity before that. Typical US cable or satellite lands between $70 and $130 a month, so a year sits somewhere between $840 and $1,560 before equipment lines and fees. Streaming bundles usually fall in between and multiply once you hold three or four of them. The number to write down is not the headline monthly rate but the twelve-month total plus whatever the provider adds for boxes, and whether that total repeats automatically without you agreeing to it again.

Four clauses do most of the work, and none of them appear on a feature grid. First, renewal: nothing here renews on its own, so a plan ends rather than quietly repeating. Second, stored payment details: we do not keep a card on file, which removes the most common source of surprise charges. Third, the refund shape — 7 days money-back on plans, returned as money rather than store credit, with the $5 trial excluded. Fourth, what canceling requires. A sub that ends by simply not buying again is structurally different from one that ends only after a retention call. Read those four before you read anything about catalog size.

1. 1Nothing auto-renews and no card is stored after checkout.
2. 27-day money-back on plans; the $5 / 24-hour trial is excluded.
3. 3Refunds are money back, not credit toward another purchase.
4. 4Unlimited installs; the ceiling that matters is simultaneous connections.

Count screens that run at the same time, not screens you own. Plans here allow 1 to 5 simultaneous connections and installs are unlimited, so the app can live on the TV, a tablet and a phone while only the concurrent streams count against you. A single viewer is fine on one connection. Two adults watching different things in the evening need two. A household where a live game runs downstairs while someone streams a film upstairs and a kid watches on a tablet needs three. Buying more connections than you use is the most common overspend in this category, and buying too few shows up as a locked stream at exactly the wrong moment.

Enough to matter if your ISP caps you, and rarely enough to matter otherwise. A 1080p stream runs about 5-8 Mbps and roughly 3 GB per hour. A 4K stream runs about 15-25 Mbps and roughly 7 GB per hour. Four hours a night at 1080p is around 360 GB in a month; the same hours at 4K approach 840 GB, which brushes against the 1 TB caps some US plans still carry. HEVC encoding delivers the same picture at about half the bitrate of H.264, so the encoder a service uses changes your monthly total as much as your viewing habits do. Check your cap before you assume 4K everywhere is free of consequences.

This is the question a sales page skips and the one that decides how a subscription feels six months in. Inside the first week of a plan, the 7-day money-back window applies and the refund comes back as money. After that, the exit is passive: the plan runs to its end date and stops, because nothing renews on its own and no card is stored to charge. There is no retention queue to sit through and no equipment to return. Compare that against a contract with an early-termination fee attached, or a bundle that keeps billing until you find the right settings page. Canceling should be an absence of action, not a project.