YouTube Premium users furious as platform hikes prices to $40: “Are they nuts?”

YouTube is jacking up the price of Premium again and users are losing their minds at how much money they’ll be paying for their subscription.

On November 7, users began to receive notifications that the cost of their YouTube Premium subscriptions would increase in just one month, on December 7.

One screenshot shared to Reddit showed that the price would rise from £16.99 ($22 USD) to £25.99 ($33.70 USD).

Another revealed that it would go from €22.99 ($24.80 USD) to €36.99 ($40 USD) – meaning that they’d be paying nearly $500 a year for their YouTube Premium subscription.

“These prices are getting insane,” an upset subscriber moaned.

“I’m actually offended by this. Sad stuff,” remarked someone else. “It seems that they’ve lost their sense of reality.”

“Are they nuts?” blasted another.

“Just cancel that subscription, you’ll thank me later,” urged a commenter, citing the 9 euro price increase.

Others noticed that the notification came from Apple, which takes a 30% cut of all purchases, which could explain the significant hike in prices.

Twitch recently had a similar controversy where Tier 1 subs were jacked up to $7.99 on mobile, much to the chagrin of users.

This leap in price comes as YouTube has begun testing a cheaper, limited version of Premium. The catch is it doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles of the standard subscription, and this “lite” version still features ads, albeit fewer than no plan at all.

Back in October, the site began investigating after users reported that they were still getting ads, even after forking over their hard-earned cash for a Premium subscription.

The Google-owned platform has also continued its quest to crack down on adblockers by coming after third-party apps such as YouTube ReVanced. The site even launched a feature to try to break adblockers forever.