Streaming service Crunchyroll raises prices weeks after killing its free tier

Sony has made streaming anime pricier since buying Crunchyroll.

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[DaveSimmons]

I still subscribe to CR because even only watching 2-3 shows a season it's still much cheaper than buying or one-time-renting those shows. Sure I own nothing and an old show can disappear at any time but it makes sense for my viewing habits.

If that changes because of ever-increasing prices and AI slop, I'll drop the sub.

 

[MilkyBarKid]

Not all OPs and EDs are worth listening to after you hear them once or twice. Sure, Cruel Angel's Thesis and Easy Breezy are certified classics and no one should ever skip them, but after hearing Parasyte's OP for the second time skipping it is entirely forgivable.

If I’m binge watching I don’t need to hear the same theme every 20 minutes. Maybe if it’s by Creepy Nuts, but otherwise…

 

[Andrewcw]

Netflix doesn’t have this problem for anime, although i live in Japan so maybe they knew better than to do that here. However, it has long felt like for western shows, they stuck to the binge model and for anime, they allowed weekly releases.

Yes they did. Historically until Amazon released shows weekly. Netflix stood their ground thinking they could retain users by shoving as much content as stock holder money could fund it. It was unsustainable. So until 2020 any release of anime was all binge watch format unless they got a co-license in which they couldn't hide content because the co-license with Crunchyroll for example would it and holding it back would be really dumb.

They've use AI on almost all translations they haven't told anyone other than the ones that specifically announced it. If you ever watch Terminator Zero. A production they funded. They definitely used AI in that to translate. Because on one scene where there was no dialogue in ANY language. I switched to english, japanese, even spanish. During a 15 second scene trying to build suspense it was all silent. yet the AI hallucinated and subtitled it.

 

[Epke]

With everything getting more expensive i am sure keeping your crunchy roll subscription is top priority!

 

[Legatum_of_Kain]

Their only legitimate competitor is Hi-Dive, and I saw one of their shows be on Crunchyroll, so I don't know how long they'll last, which is a bummer, they're one of the few services with unrated shows.

 

[nzod]

Who in fuck's name is watching anime and uncultured enough to want to do this

I've been getting into anime lately, appreciating it more and more (started delving into animation after seeing Arcane S1).

One thing that's been mostly horrible is the theme songs (with a few exceptions like Cowboy Bebop, GitS SAC, ...). Usually I can't move fast enough to skip over them.

Repetition is another thing, as a commenter noted above. Though with Yoko Kanno's works for example I don't mind that.

 

[SiriusEx]

Are they doing fully regional pricing now? Just checked my CR account (that was rolled over from Funimation that was rolled over from AnimeLab) in NZ and prices are still listed as NZ$9.99/$12.49 per month for Fan/Mega Fan (no Ultra option) or NZ$99.99/$124.99 per year. That's only ~US$6.00/$7.50 per month or US$60.00/$75.00 per year*. The only email I got today mentioned updated ToS but nothing about price changes.

OTOH, good that this got me to check since I was auto-enrolled into Mega Fan from Funimation and I don't need 4-devices streaming nor care for the games, guess I save 20%

* All excluding taxes, which is weird for NZ pricing but makes it easily comparable to US pricing, I guess

EDIT: Another page shows "${price} + GST Inclusive", so that's another 15% off the listed price? What confusing wording.

 

[darkowl]

Sony's gotta recoup those Concord losses somehow I guess.

 

[IceStorm]

Crunchyroll has been making their subtitles worse:


View: https://youtu.be/B-DX0Zolr6g

• Font quality is awful
• Timing no longer lines up properly
• Subs are cut off mid-sentence
• Characters speaking over each other is rendered as stacks of dialog with no identifiers
• Typesetting is no longer being performed (replacing Japanese characters on-screen with localized text). This means reading on-screen text is no longer an option

Crunchroll, up to a few months ago, used an anime-centric open source tool, Aegisub. The downsides to Aegisub are that it requires skill to use, and that doing things "right" requires a significant amount of time for each localization (read: more headcount).

As of a few months ago, Crunchyroll moved to using Ooona, a tool that has zero support for typesetting, along with none of the anime-centric details that Aegisub supports outside typesetting.

One reason Crunchyroll stood out was that their subtitles and typesetting were clearly better than anything Amazon or Netflix could provide, with neither of them supporting typesetting at all. With Ooona, all of that is gone.

So why has this happened? Funimation. This is effectively the anime industry's Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger. Sure, they kept the Crunchyroll name, but because Funimation had been part of Sony longer, all of Funimation's executives had seniority. As Sony has been cutting staff at Crunchyroll, it's the anime fans at Crunchyroll who knew what they were doing that have been fired, leaving the morons from Funimation who couldn't run a streaming service nor a merch site, in charge.

I have a Crunchyroll sub. I may not for much longer. I'd rather find alternate sources for the few series I watch than put up with the garbage they've been shoveling out as of late.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Something like this could only happen where there's a thriving, healthy market dominated by the forces of competition and consumer choice!!!

Edit: Forgot the Exclamation Marks of Sardonic Labeling.

 

[C.M. Allen]

Like all price hikes, this will send more people sailing the high seas, and these particular ones are easy to navigate

That's probably why this price hike comes rapidly off law enforcement's seizure and closure of one of the world's large animate pirating sites -- access to 'free' anime was strong competition and was depressing the 'market value' of the paid service.

 

[Woolfe]

I figured this was coming.

Here in Aus we had Animelab(also bought and shutdown by Sony), which had a much better app in my opinion. I never used funimation, but we were using crunchyroll as it was the only way we could legally access some anime, but it was always worse than animelab.

I am seeing anime on all the services nowadays, but Netflix seems to be the only company making a concerted effort to court and support more of it(Of the main streamers that is).

I don't mind crunchyroll as it stands at the moment. But I am fearful of the enshitification effect.

 

[Razster]

No thanks. I closed my account. Not getting another penny from me.

 

[Shiranui]

Crunchyroll lives on because it remains the go-to place for fans who literally want all of the anime.

For the newer shows, at least.

As someone who is increasingly gravitating to "the classics" like Bubblegum Crisis or Gunsmith Cats for their different, more unique styles compared to contemporary anime, I found Crunchyroll's library depressingly lopsided.

 

[close]

This won't drive anyone towards piracy.

 

[l3onc1t0_]

I cannot watch Berserk, nor Bebop on crunchy, and now they even want to raise the price??? Who is going to subscribe to this terrible offer?

 

[sd70mac]

Who in fuck's name is watching anime and uncultured enough to want to do this

If someone is watching multiple episodes back-to-back of, say, Ro+Vam (or even MLP:FiM, although that most likely wouldn’t be Crunchyroll [R.I.P. unfinished Japanese language release of FiM], the regular intro before every single episode can be a real time-waster, even more so if binging a whole season. Now, there are shows that don’t recycle the same intro on most episodes (ironically the example that comes to mind also wouldn’t be on Crunchyroll, Star Wars: The Clone Wars), and in some cases skipping the intro would also mean missing something relevant to the story.

 

[lordbyte]

Their localization went to shit the moment Sony took over too. From that point on there would be only French subs for animes, in a country that's majority dutch-speaking. No dutch ones AND they took away the English ones.... For no apparent reason.
I went back to the old-school way of watching anime (no not the VHS tapes), and will NEVER come back to Crunchy.

 

[dogwitch]

[citation needed]

Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that anime distribution in the US is now effectively a duopoly.

past that. atm anime is a growing market around the world. simple fact of there is not enough company to animate the anime.
people want the most cheap ass price for streaming. the money for the anime has to come from some where.

 

[Ericridge]

I purchase only from Funimation and right stuf in terms of anime, but now that both is gone and there is only Crunchyroll? I have decided to drop anime as whole. I will do anything to avoid giving Crunchyroll even one red cent. They're disgusting and arrogant beyond belief. So I am happy to say I ignored them even during their illegal days.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Funny thing about this. Prior to this particular price increase. They took away the option to annually subscribe for about 1-2 years. Back in about 2020 - 2022 they took away the annual plan which was $60 at the time. And in 2024 they jacked it up to $80 for legacy. And brought back the Annual plan at $99 so legacy customers still got a discount.

Now it's the scramble for money. With this offer


After the fact that i'd say %99.99 of the people on the $80 plan i was on all bought plans during Black Friday sales from ancient times they stopped having and just kept it up because it was cheaper then cancelling and resubscribing. So now less then legacy users who already got billed.


I assume they mean for "older content" they were too lazy to update.

The rentseeking continues. And it's Sony so the profit gouging and ensuing shittification will be maximal.
And then, once their options on offer are crippled enough by advertising and expensive enough to be beyond the reasonable purse of a market already glutted in entertainment options, they'll start whine about pirates when consumers who've already burned their entertainment budget download some episodes of what they'll likely not have the time to watch anyway, just to see what the fuss is all about. After which, to view crunchyroll at all, you'll likely have to install some horribly intrusive spiritual successor of their rootkit and consumers will drop the entire site like a fish left out in the hot sun.

Even back in the early days of the pirate wars the writing was on the wall that what would eventually bury the copyright cult wouldn't be people making unlawful copies but the fact that there are only so many hours in the day consumers can watch media, and that demand is covered a thousand times over.

Between dozens of channels offering 24/7 programming, half a dozen streaming services, a few dozen popular MMO's of all kinds, triple-A game titles, and a few thousand indie artists profiling themselves on youtube it may be time for Sony to realize that trying to peddle "Cyan-haired Friendship-is-Magic Murderhobo, imaginatively named sequel/spinoff number 27" at the comparative pricing from the blockbuster VCR era of the 80's simply isn't going to work. People won't pay premium prices for what they simply don't have the eyeball time to spend on.

 

[fizzlefist]

To say nothing of their awful AI-powered cost cutting… they’re getting rid of human-made subtitles, because letting a chatbot translate Japanese to English always works well.

 

[KeyboardWeeb]

I stopped giving Crunchy money in the Before Time, when there was a big dust-up over their video quality. Since then, they've only gotten worse, and while I was never a Funi subscriber, I was a frequent RightStuf buyer. I have not forgiven them for it.

 

[Edgar Allan Esquire]

It sucks but it's still my best value subscription for getting shows each season I'll watch.

Hidive was advertising itself as the thirst trap service, so I hadn't really bothered keeping up with it.

Hulu started trimming back a lot of Fox/Disney content, presumably to get more bundlers.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Something like this could only happen where there's a thriving, healthy market dominated by the forces of competition and consumer choice!!!

Edit: Forgot the Exclamation Marks of Sardonic Labeling.

Well, by definition, every IP, and copyright especially, is a de facto and de jure Monopoly, so I wouldn't be so quick to toss the Free Market out based on what is a very hard break from ol' Adam Smith's ideas about economies.

TL;DR?

Sony will Sony.

 

[sword_9mm]

To say nothing of their awful AI-powered cost cutting… they’re getting rid of human-made subtitles, because letting a chatbot translate Japanese to English always works well.

I'd honestly expect that to be an actual good use of LLM/AI/whatever word of the day.

I guess like anything else it can be good if used properly or complete garbage which this looks to be.

 

[Foxtrot360]

As much as that's true, the amount is trivial if that's what you were subbing to before.

My concern would only be if this became an annual thing. Then I'd put them on the "I'll sub every few months" list along with the others.

I currently watch enough anime to make $10 actually worth my time on site. So it's not ALWAYS a major issue to EVERYONE.

The TREND is bothersome, but as with all things in life, shit happens. And life IS change. So I take the change as it happens, and adapt to it. I suspect most people do. Those who can, of course. The two dollars a month more won't be missed in MOST households, assuming they only sub to the bottom tier like I do. Yes, it's another straw on the back of the camel.

But it's a comparatively small straw. And for anime fans, probably not an insurmountable hurdle to clear.

I am far from their target demo. However I do like to watch a show when the mood strikes - maybe once every 6 months or so I'll watch a season of something. The free tier supported this even if the ads were annoying. I don't watch enough that I'd ever subscribe so the free tier was great for me - and generated the occasional bit of ad revenue for Sony when I'd hop in. I can't be the only one like that and this is what Sony just killed with the free tier.

 

[methodmadness00]

On the one hand, the proliferation of subscriptions, the constant hiking of prices, and the killing of cheaper, more independent options are infuriating; the average consumer is truly getting nickel and dimed to death. On the other hand, I am a young Gen-Xer who remembers when the only way to watch anime was to buy bootlegs through shady mail order shops / conventions or $30-50 VHS tapes with a couple episodes on them at Suncoast or something. So from the historical standpoint it still seems like anime fans are living in a golden age of affordable accessibility.

 

[Scifigod]

Isn’t there a substantial overlap between “anime fan” and “someone who will pirate content when it becomes too expensive/a hassle to pay for”?

It's almost a necessity if you're not chasing current shows because unless it's considered a "classic" (your Bebops, Evangelions, Ghibli films) it's just about guaranteed that it physical release is long out of print and probably not even legally streamable anywhere. Afaik there's not anywhere to legally watch silent Mobius or betterman to name two.

It's one of the reasons I keep a sub to Retrocrush. They don't have a very wide catalog but they seem pretty committed to going back and finding forgotten gems.

https://www.mediaocd.com/ seems to be taking the same tactic for physical releases. Doing remasters and releases for stuff that has a cult following but not enough popularity for one of the big distributors to keep an active license.

 

[cfenton]

In the past year, I’ve seen a lot of people sharing how to build their own media libraries. The constant price raising for streaming services/saas/etc is pushing consumers to look “elsewhere.” Wonder when the breaking point with consumers will be.

Building your own digital library is certainly a good option, but it's not cheap. I built an Unraid system a few years ago using an old desktop. Just the HDDs cost close to $1000CAD for 3x14TB drives. Most people would have to buy a computer or NAS, so add another $300-$500.

Even assuming you're getting the media for free, that's still a lot of subscription time before you break even. Say you're replacing $50 a month in subscriptions, that's almost two years. Then you need to take into account the cost of power, replacement drives, and whatever software you're going to use (a VPN at least).

 

[TylerH]

I miss them too. I totally get why they got rid of them. I remember seeing a pro nazi joke in the comments one day and knew it would be a matter of time.

Eh, they could have spent a minimal amount of investment on auto-detection and flagging or even auto-deletion of incendiary content and a fairly small team of staff to moderate comments... most were just noise or were actually useful, because there was basically zero barrier to entry to posting comments... even free accounts could do it. You gate comments behind the now-$100/year subscription, suddenly your troll problem goes way down.

 

[TD912]

That's a weird characterization when a few sentence before the article says "Sony bought Crunchyroll from AT&T".

To be honest, I don't think there's any ideal situation for media consumption. People want to be able to watch everything on a single platform, but that means consolidation, and so less competition on price.

Crunchyroll's history of being a pirate site is interesting. They were their own thing, gradually went legit after partnering with some studios and Japanese TV stations, then some investor bought them and combined it into "VRV" which was supposed to be a collection of nerdy fandom streaming services. Then that was bought up by AT&T along with Warner and a bunch of other companies as they were trying to create a mega streaming service with HBO Max at the time.

They actually left Crunchyroll mostly alone during this time, and I was subscribed and actually appreciated the service. They still felt very "fan-powered" and some of the streaming tech they used were based on open source projects that pirate fansubs also used. Some of the shows also ended up streaming on HBO Max along with some Cartoon Network/Adult Swim shows from Warner.

Then a few years later AT&T backtracks on the whole plan and wants to sell off stuff to reduce their debt, and sells CR off to Sony (and merges it with Funimation) and Warner to Discovery.

I ended up unsubscribing around this time, and CR started becoming more corporate and adding extra DRM to the video, preventing screenshots to share on social media. They never treated their translators well, but I've been reading leaks from employees about how Sony corporate execs were taking over and moving things to some crap AI translation and subtitle platform too.

 

[Voo42]

$8 to $10 is a 25% increase, which is even worse.

Unfortunately companies have realised that people won’t look at in terms of percentages, but it seems very few people will quit a platform over a couple of bucks. But it’s a huge profit boost.

A 25% price increase over a period of time where inflation amounted also about 25% (depends a bit when in 2019 they did their last increase) is not particularly shocking or insidious to me. It just puts the price on the same level as it was in 2019.

I don't mind the price increase if they keep it in line with inflation, I do mind their subtitles which got significantly worse both quality wise (see IceStorms post) and availability wise (why do I get a limited choice of language for subtitles? I prefer English over German thank you very much).

 

[NOT_RICK]

That's so weird, the subscription cost of my jellyfin server is still a big fat 0...

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Crunchyroll has been making their subtitles worse:


View: https://youtu.be/B-DX0Zolr6g

• Font quality is awful
• Timing no longer lines up properly
• Subs are cut off mid-sentence
• Characters speaking over each other is rendered as stacks of dialog with no identifiers
• Typesetting is no longer being performed (replacing Japanese characters on-screen with localized text). This means reading on-screen text is no longer an option

Crunchroll, up to a few months ago, used an anime-centric open source tool, Aegisub. The downsides to Aegisub are that it requires skill to use, and that doing things "right" requires a significant amount of time for each localization (read: more headcount).

As of a few months ago, Crunchyroll moved to using Ooona, a tool that has zero support for typesetting, along with none of the anime-centric details that Aegisub supports outside typesetting.

One reason Crunchyroll stood out was that their subtitles and typesetting were clearly better than anything Amazon or Netflix could provide, with neither of them supporting typesetting at all. With Ooona, all of that is gone.

So why has this happened? Funimation. This is effectively the anime industry's Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger. Sure, they kept the Crunchyroll name, but because Funimation had been part of Sony longer, all of Funimation's executives had seniority. As Sony has been cutting staff at Crunchyroll, it's the anime fans at Crunchyroll who knew what they were doing that have been fired, leaving the morons from Funimation who couldn't run a streaming service nor a merch site, in charge.

I have a Crunchyroll sub. I may not for much longer. I'd rather find alternate sources for the few series I watch than put up with the garbage they've been shoveling out as of late.

Heck that doesn't even sound anime-centric. Those features would be great for ALL subtitles across formats. Considering how challenging accurate translation can be, frankly "overnight" translation sounds like a nightmare bound to result in inaccuracies. Why not just have a little patience, give the staff doing translations time to get it right with proper cultural nuance, and get something that'll stand the test of time?

 

[HiroTheProtagonist]

Heck that doesn't even sound anime-centric. Those features would be great for ALL subtitles across formats. Considering how challenging accurate translation can be, frankly "overnight" translation sounds like a nightmare bound to result in inaccuracies. Why not just have a little patience, give the staff doing translations time to get it right with proper cultural nuance, and get something that'll stand the test of time?

Probably because the main draw of Crunchyroll is speed. I haven't checked the marketing copy in a while, but for the longest time "simulcast within an hour of original air time!" was one of their biggest selling points. And while the translations aren't great, they've usually been about on-par with the old HorribleSubs releases I used to watch back in college.

At the same time, subs are kind of losing the proverbial battle, since more and more fans want dubs and Amazon is already spearheading the use of AI voice dubs (Banana Fish did not deserve that level of disrespect). I predict that fan subs will probably remain the only way to get culturally nuanced subtitling as more streaming services move towards the Crunchyroll/Amazon methods.

 

[ashypans]

Not all OPs and EDs are worth listening to after you hear them once or twice. Sure, Cruel Angel's Thesis and Easy Breezy are certified classics and no one should ever skip them, but after hearing Parasyte's OP for the second time skipping it is entirely forgivable.

The Easy Brezzy OP triggers my wife's motion sickness but still we weather through it cause it's a banger

 

[M Doiron]

It seems like every business is looking to move from selling you something you own to letting you pay for something that you might think you own, but you really don't. And once they have you locked in (at least they think so), they raise the price. From software applications to streaming media, from smart home devices to heated car seats, it's really getting ridiculous. I'm glad I have a collection of physical media for my reading and television viewing. Yes, it takes up space. But it's really mine; there's no practical way for anyone but a thief to make it so I don't have it to use or watch anymore. I probably need to move away from Google Home, which is getting pretty horrible at this scheme of paying for something, then changing to take away what worked fine to something in which half my devices refuse to operate on command. I honestly think we just need to start taking physical possession and local control back to let the companies know we will not play their rip-off you-don't-own-it-here's-your-revised-monthly-payment-with fewer-features-games.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Probably because the main draw of Crunchyroll is speed. I haven't checked the marketing copy in a while, but for the longest time "simulcast within an hour of original air time!" was one of their biggest selling points. And while the translations aren't great, they've usually been about on-par with the old HorribleSubs releases I used to watch back in college.

At the same time, subs are kind of losing the proverbial battle, since more and more fans want dubs and Amazon is already spearheading the use of AI voice dubs (Banana Fish did not deserve that level of disrespect). I predict that fan subs will probably remain the only way to get culturally nuanced subtitling as more streaming services move towards the Crunchyroll/Amazon methods.

Eh? I thought the U.S. was finally starting to get used to reading subtitles on stuff thanks to the popularity of shows like Squid Games. One thing's for sure, I have NO desire to hear robots dubbing over my foreign language media, and if this is where it's heading count me out.

The same-day stuff is just frightful. I'd rather just wait a month to get higher quality written dialog, and if I must, a year to get better quality dubbing. Then again, I'm very patient when it comes to waiting for certain books to get quality translations. I'm a fan of the Tolkien translation of Beowulf, and that took centuries to come out after the original book's release. It's a quality English-to-English translation. Alright I admit I don't have THAT kind of time but still.

 

[HiroTheProtagonist]

Eh? I thought the U.S. was finally starting to get used to reading subtitles on stuff thanks to the popularity of shows like Squid Games. One thing's for sure, I have NO desire to hear robots dubbing over my foreign language media, and if this is where it's heading count me out.

The same-day stuff is just frightful. I'd rather just wait a month to get higher quality written dialog, and if I must, a year to get better quality dubbing.

That's mostly based on my interactions with other anime fans. Lots of them put shows on "in the background" and aren't paying close attention to the screen, so they want the dialog in a language they understand rather than reading subtitles. And at this point, there are some pretty good VAs that manage to deliver good performances, so it's not like the 80s/90s where 99% of dubs were either hilariously bad or "Microsoft Sam on quaaludes".

The latter is just a function of the attention market. Most anime tends to fall into "flavor of the month" and rarely holds attention beyond the primary airing date, so being first to market with something non-JP understanders can digest matters more than ensuring the translations are both highly-accurate and localized.