When I discovered that I could get YouTube Premium for around $3 per month, I snapped it up right away. At the time, I didn’t realise that YouTube Music was included in the deal, so I cancelled my subscription to Spotify and now enjoy all the benefits of ad-free videos and music. I should add here that a couple of years ago I bought an Amazon Echo Dot and foolishly subscribed to Amazon Music, which I also cancelled and ended up using the Echo Dot device as a dumb Bluetooth speaker. However, I couldn’t get rid of the annoying Alexa “Connected to Marc’s Galaxy Note Ultra…” announcement when pairing, so I unplugged it and bought a JBL Flip 7 instead. More on that another time when I write about the benefits of going dumb!
YouTube Premium Family Plan
The individual Premium plan in the US is $16, and in the UK it’s £13, rising to $26 for a US family plan and £20 in the UK. The family plan covers up to six family members, but they must all live at the same physical address, which in this day and age seems very draconian. Many subscribers have managed to overcome this restriction by various means, but Google is clamping down with monthly IP address checks, apparently.
To be eligible to share a YouTube family membership, each family member must live at the same residential address as the family manager. Every 30 days, an electronic check-in will confirm this requirement.
For me, the family plan almost doubles the cost, and since there are only the two of us in the household, it’s clearly not viable.
Two-Person Plan
But, quite by chance, I came across the YouTube Premium two-person plan, which miraculously is available in Argentina (one of only ten countries) and only costs us around a dollar extra per month. I signed my wife up right away because she was being bombarded with ads on her phone which were driving her crazy. We both use our own Google/YouTube accounts but with the Premium benefits at a fraction of the prices in first-world countries. It’s similar to Spotify Duo, and in France, for example, it’s around 20 euros, which isn’t cheap.
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