You're paying more for Netflix than ever, and it just laid off 1,000 people
The bill went up in March for the second time in fourteen months. On October 14, six percent of the company went out the door.
Here is the ledger from the subscriber's side of the screen. In March, Netflix raised every plan again: Standard went from $17.99 to $19.99, Premium from $24.99 to $26.99, the ad tier from $7.99 to $8.99 — the second hike in a little over a year. On October 14, the company began cutting roughly 1,000 jobs, about 6 percent of its 16,000 employees and its largest layoff since 2022.
Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters framed the cuts in an internal memo as a matter of discipline about where the company puts its people, not distress. One line from it is doing the heavy lifting in every writeup:
"Our business is strong and growing."
— Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, in the layoffs memo
That framing is precisely what subscribers are choking on. The 2022 cuts came from a company in crisis, bleeding subscribers for the first time in a decade; these come from a company that booked $45.2 billion in 2025 revenue and says it remains on track for its full-year forecast.
"Why does my sub keep going up if they won't even keep everyone employed?"
— a commenter on r/movies
Who actually got cut
The memo says most eliminations hit product, tech, legal, and human resources. The first name to surface publicly, though, came from none of those departments: Doug Belgrad, a film VP and one of film chief Dan Lin's first hires in 2024, is out, and Netflix declined to comment on his exit.
Belgrad is not a junior casualty. He ran Sony's Motion Picture Group before Netflix hired him, and he leaves in a year when Netflix's own films have been working — the genre slate delivered with The Rip, Apex, and War Machine, and the company is mid-pivot into theaters with The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth getting an IMAX run in November and Narnia getting a 45-day theatrical window in February. Cutting into a film team during the film division's best stretch is the kind of math the memo's language doesn't cover.
"Somebody has to pay for management's mistakes because it certainly won't be management."
— a commenter on r/movies
What the money is being pointed at
The stated logic is competition for attention rather than against other streamers. YouTube passed Netflix in average daily viewing in 2025, TikTok is closing on it, and Netflix's answer has been spending on live events and sports, games, the TikTok-shaped Clips feed, and those theatrical experiments — all while viewing growth has slowed to around 2 percent. Losing the Warner Bros. Discovery auction to Paramount Skydance earlier this year closed off the other route to growth, which was buying it.
Previously we wrote: Sam Levinson signed with Amazon after Euphoria. Fans are congratulating HBO
For the person paying $19.99, the near-term translation is blunt. The price isn't coming down, the headcount behind the product is, and the savings are earmarked for formats you didn't subscribe for in 2015. Netflix is betting you'll stay for the live fights and the vertical feed; the people it just cut were part of the version of the service you were originally paying for.
Netflix's revenue hit $45.2 billion in 2025. The price went up twice in fourteen months, and 1,000 jobs went away anyway.