Costco Now Offers Discounted Apple Subscriptions | Here’s How They Add Up

The company recently joined others like Best Buy in offering an attractive slew of services at reduced prices.
Costco Offers Discounted Apple Subscriptions Credit: Koshiro K / Shutterstock
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If you’re looking to save a bit of money on Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, or Apple News+, Costco has recently started selling annual subscriptions to these Apple services at a nice discount.

Perhaps to make up for the disappearance of discounted iTunes Gift Cards, Costco is now selling Apple streaming subscriptions for a similar discount.

You can pick up a year of Apple TV+ or Apple Arcade for $44.99, which works out to $5 off the normal yearly price, or around $15 less than you’d pay monthly.

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Apple News+ provides an even better deal, at $89.99 for an annual subscription. Since Apple doesn’t sell a yearly subscription to News+, this lets you get on board for around $30 less than paying $9.99 monthly over the same period.

What’s great about these deals is that you can also buy them as gifts for friends and family since they’re not tied to your Apple ID at the time of purchase. Instead, Costco gives you a redemption code, much like you’d get in the old days when buying iTunes Gift Cards from Costco. You can then load that redemption code into any account you want.

You can even buy more than one subscription to the same service, although there’s a limit of five per member. They also have to be redeemed within a year from the date of purchase, so you won’t be able to save them for later. It’s not clear if you can redeem more than one at the same time to get multiple years upfront, but you can certainly buy subscriptions for other people.

While you can use these to extend individual Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, or Apple News+ subscriptions, you can’t use them as part of an Apple One bundle. With Apple One, you’re already getting a better discount on the bundled services anyway.

Costco appears to be selling these both online at Costco.com and in its warehouse stores. For those interested in Apple’s services, it’s a nice replacement for the days when you used to be able to pick up iTunes Gift Cards at 10 percent off.

For years, Costco members could top up their iTunes balance by purchasing iTunes Gift Cards at Costco for $0.90 on the dollar. For example, a $100 iTunes Gift Card could be purchased at Costco for $90, but it would still be worth $100 on the App Store or iTunes Store. From time to time, Costco even offered deeper discounts. Since your Apple ID balance was used for all digital purchases, this was a great way to get 10 percent off apps, music, movies and TV shows, books, and in-app purchases and subscriptions.

This all stopped when Apple switched to its universal gift cards two years ago, combining the gift cards used to purchase products at Apple Stores and those used for digital purposes into a single “Apple Gift Cards.” Once this happened, Apple wasn’t going to provide Costco with a 10 percent discount on gift cards that could be used for Macs, iPads, and iPhones.

While Costco’s new discounted subscriptions aren’t nearly as versatile, at least members interested in Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, or Apple News+ can get the same discounts on those services. If you haven’t tried Apple TV+ or Apple News+ before, you can also get extended free trials from Best Buy.

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