Max Follows Netflix and Disney With Extra Member Accounts | Here’s What They’ll Cost You
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It’s been two years since Netflix cracked down on password-sharing, inspiring other streaming giants to do the same.
Disney was the first to follow Netflix’s lead, announcing plans for its password-sharing crackdown in August 2023. A few months later, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max announced it would be next.
Unlike Netflix, which had everything in place when it began enforcing household-only use of member accounts, Disney and Max have been slightly more vague about how their rollouts would work. To be fair, Netflix got started much earlier — we’d heard about its plans in 2021, and it ran trials in several South American countries the following year — but it also avoided any official announcements until it had figured everything out.
Most significantly, Netflix had “Extra Member” accounts ready to go from day one, providing an option for subscribers who wanted to share their accounts with folks outside their households legitimately. Disney+ announced its plans to block the use of its accounts outside of a single household before it had anything specific to say about extra members. It wasn’t until early 2024, when it began blocking password sharing, that it also acknowledged a “paid sharing” add-on was coming. However, those didn’t arrive until September.
If you think that sounds like a recipe for a confusing rollout, you’re right. From what Disney execs were saying, it seemed like the company was trying to encourage folks who had been sharing accounts to move to full Disney+ accounts before offering a more affordable option.
Thankfully, Max seems to have learned from Disney’s awkward messaging and delayed enforcing password sharing in earnest until it had its Extra Member plans ready to go. When Warner Bros. Discovery (WDB) revealed its plans for a crackdown on the sharing of Max accounts, it suggested it would start in late 2024, with “a broader rollout in 2025.”
We never saw any indications that Max was doing much last year. A few folks reported getting warnings, but nobody was being cut off. Instead, it seems like WBD wanted to wait until it could provide extra-household Max users with a more affordable way to stick around and continue enjoying the service.
This week, WBD announced its new “Extra Member Add-On feature” for $7.99 monthly across all subscription tiers. At the same time, it’s also adding the ability for existing users to transition their profiles to the new accounts seamlessly.
“Extra Member Add-On and Profile Transfer are two key Max advancements, designed to help viewers with a new way to enjoy our best-in-class content at an exceptional value, and offer subscribers greater flexibility in managing their accounts,” said JB Perrette, CEO and President, Global Streaming and Games, Warner Bros Discovery. “These updates provide a simple way for subscribers to add-on a new member to their account, or for existing subscribers who have users outside of their household to smoothly, and in an uninterrupted fashion, transition their profile so that extra member can continue to access Max.”
While the Extra Members Add-On is available for the same price regardless of which tier an eligible account holder is subscribed to, there’s an important catch: you only get one.
This mirrors how Disney+ does it, but it falls short of Netflix, which offers up to two extra members if you’re a Premium subscriber. Of course, in addition to the $24.99 cost of the Premium plan, you’ll pay $7–9 per month for each of those, depending on whether you want them with ads or not. In an unusual twist, Max lets you add extra members to its ad-supported plan, although we’re not sure that’s worth the bother since the extra member is only $2 less than having the person sign up for their own ad-supported Max plan.
Like other streaming services, you must be paying for Max directly to be eligible to add an extra member account, rather than being billed through a third-party like your Internet, mobile, or TV provider. You also can’t add extra members if you subscribe to the Disney+, Hulu, and Max bundle.
