The Subscription Price Index (India)

What Indian subscriptions actually cost, taken from the companies’ own pricing pages — not from press coverage, not from memory, and not converted from dollars. Every figure below carries a source link, a verification date, and an honest confidence rating.

Download the full CSVRead the methodology

What the data shows

1. In India, an annual plan is not “two months free” — it is roughly half price

Across the 14 plans in this index that publish both a monthly and an annual price, the annual option costs a median of 56.4% less than paying the monthly price twelve times. That is not the global norm. Software follows the familiar pattern — Microsoft 365 gives exactly 16.6%, the classic two-months-free discount. Indian streaming services do something different entirely: SonyLIV’s annual plan is 68.7% cheaper than its own monthly plan.

The practical reading: for most Indian OTT services, the monthly plan is best understood as a convenience surcharge rather than a payment option.

2. The paid entry point for Indian streaming is now ₹79

Of the six services in this index that sell a monthly plan directly, the cheapest tiers run from ₹79 to ₹399, with a median of ₹124. The top tiers — the plans a household would actually share — have a median of ₹349.

3. Consumer AI in India has a 48.9× price ladder — and almost nobody publishes a rupee price

This is the most surprising thing in the dataset and the least reported. Only Google and Microsoft publish India-specific consumer AI pricing in rupees on a page we could read. Google sells three paid tiers — AI Plus at ₹399, AI Pro at ₹1,950, and AI Ultra, which comes in a ₹6,500 (5×) and a ₹19,500 (20×) usage option. Bottom to top, that is a 48.9× spread.

OpenAI, Perplexity, Cursor, GitHub, Midjourney and ElevenLabs publish no INR figure at all. OpenAI’s own page says “US price displayed. Go pricing is localized in some markets”, and its help centre says “All purchases are in USD — we offer a local currency billing in a limited set of countries.” An Indian buyer therefore cannot see what they will actually be charged until checkout, after card FX markup and tax. Every USD row in this index is published as USD, deliberately unconverted — a converted figure would be our estimate wearing the vendor’s name.

4. Netflix India has been frozen for four years and eight months — and the March 2026 rise was not India’s

Mobile ₹149 / Basic ₹199 / Standard ₹499 / Premium ₹649 have held since 14 December 2021, across a period of repeated increases elsewhere. When Netflix confirmed another price rise on 26 March 2026, that was the US market; India was not included. We are flagging it because the assumption goes the other way by default.

An honesty note on our own data: only ₹149 and ₹649 are verifiable on netflix.com/in today, via its own line “Plans range from ₹149 to ₹649/month”. The two middle tiers come from the December 2021 release and are marked MEDIUM here for exactly that reason.

5. Thirteen verified price changes — and they do not all point upward

• JioHotstar Premium annual: ₹1,499 → ₹2,199 28 Jan 2026
  A 46.7% increase in a single step, the largest verified move in the dataset. Business Standard frames the revision as applying to new users; existing auto-renewing subscribers were grandfathered at their old rate.
• Spotify Premium Standard: ₹199 → ₹139 14 May 2026
  A 30% cut. Student fell ₹99 → ₹69. India is one of the few markets where Spotify’s headline price went down. The same change discontinued Premium Lite in India, and Duo and Family had already closed to new signups on 13 November 2025. Note the ₹799 “annual” is a one-time prepaid plan that does not auto-renew.
• Amazon Prime Video introduced advertising 17 Jun 2025
  The headline ₹1,499 did not change, but ad-free viewing now costs ₹129/month or ₹699/year on top. An effective increase that never appeared as one.
• HBO Max launched in India inside JioHotstar 15 Apr 2026
  From ₹49/month as an add-on. The official release describes JioHotstar as HBO Max’s exclusive home in India.
• Amazon Music Unlimited announced for India 2 Jun 2026
  ₹99/month for Prime members and ₹119 otherwise, both after a free trial — six months for Prime members, three for everyone else. Prime Music was simultaneously downgraded to ad-supported with no offline playback.
• YouTube Premium Lite reached India at ₹89 Sept 2025, expanded 12 Mar 2026
  Background play and downloads were added in March 2026, narrowing the gap to the ₹149 Individual tier considerably. This is the only YouTube Premium India price we could attest to an official Google source.
• Netflix Mobile launched at ₹199, then fell to ₹149 14 Dec 2021
  The last verified Netflix India price movement in either direction.
• Amazon Prime Shopping Edition ₹399/year buys no entertainment Jun 2024
  Worth stating plainly, because people assume every Prime tier includes Prime Video. This one does not.

The full dataset

USD rows are the vendor’s published list price and are shown unconverted. “Per month” divides quarterly prices by three and annual prices by twelve; it is arithmetic on the vendor’s own figure, not a separate claim.

Methodology

Which services are tracked

Consumer subscriptions that a person in India can buy directly, across five categories: OTT / streaming video, AI tools, music and audio, productivity software, and cloud storage. Version 1.0 covers 26 services and 93 individual price points. Enterprise-only pricing, per-seat B2B tiers negotiated on request, and telecom bundles are out of scope for v1.0.

Source criteria — in strict order of preference

1. The vendor’s own India pricing page (for example apple.com/in/apple-music, spotify.com/in-en/premium).
2. The vendor’s official help centre or support article (for example SonyLIV’s and ZEE5’s subscription articles).
3. The vendor’s official India newsroom or corporate blog (for example about.netflix.com, aboutamazon.in, blog.google/intl/en-in).
4. The vendor’s official app-store in-app-purchase listing on the India storefront — used only where the web page geo-blocks or renders prices client-side, and always marked MEDIUM.

Third-party news reporting is never used as a price source. It is used only to establish when a change happened, and is labelled as such in the row’s notes.

Confidence ratings

HIGH  The figure was read directly on the vendor’s own page. 62 rows.
MEDIUM  The figure came from an official-but-secondary channel — an app-store IAP listing on the India storefront, a help article whose publication date could not be confirmed as current, an official release too old to treat as a current statement, or two independent reports in exact agreement where no official page was readable. 31 rows.

There is no LOW tier in the published dataset. Anything we could not verify to at least MEDIUM is listed openly under what we could not verify rather than filled in with a plausible number.

Currency and conversion

All Indian prices are in Indian Rupees (INR, ₹) exactly as displayed by the vendor. Where a vendor publishes no INR price, the USD list price is shown as USD and is never converted. A converted figure would be our arithmetic against a moving exchange rate, presented as though it were the company’s price. That is precisely the kind of number this index exists to replace.

How tax is treated

Honestly, and that means admitting a limitation. Not one of the roughly forty official pages consulted stated whether its displayed price includes or excludes GST. Every row is therefore flagged GST treatment not stated on source page. The single exception found anywhere was Zoho One, whose page states verbatim that its prices do not include VAT. We are not asserting that consumer rupee prices are GST-inclusive, because no vendor said so.

How discounts and promotions are treated

The index records the standing list price. Introductory offers, festival promotions, telecom bundles and student rates are recorded separately and never substituted for the list price. Three examples of why this matters: Amazon Prime’s ₹999 Prime Day rate is a promotion against a ₹1,499 list price; Google AI Plus advertises ₹199 for six months against a ₹399 list price; and a free telecom giveaway makes the effective price zero without changing the list price by a rupee. Student tiers appear as their own rows because they are permanent published plans, not time-limited offers.

Update cadence and last collection date

The full dataset is re-verified monthly. Individual rows are re-checked within seven days of a publicly announced change. Every row carries its own last_verified date, so a stale row is visible rather than quietly wrong. Last full data collection: 9 August 2026.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, we want to fix it and we will say that we did. Send the service, the plan, the correct price and the official URL to the contact address on our contact page. Corrections are logged in the changelog with their date.

Who publishes this, and the obvious conflict of interest

Reported, but held out of the table

These figures are circulating widely in Indian coverage. We have not been able to read them on the vendor’s own page, so they are recorded here rather than published as data.

• Anthropic Claude AI
  Rupee pricing reportedly began rolling out to Indian users around 13-14 July 2026: Pro Rs 2,399/mo (approx Rs 2,000/mo billed annually), Max 5x Rs 11,999/mo, Max 20x Rs 23,999/mo, Team Rs 2,999/seat/mo. claude.com/pricing still serves USD from outside India, and Anthropic has not publicly confirmed the rollout reaches every user in the country. Held out of the main table until an official India page can be read. · report
• OpenAI ChatGPT Go AI
  Rs 399/month is widely reported for India but OpenAI publishes no INR figure. Its own page states 'US price displayed. Go pricing is localized in some markets', and its help centre states 'All purchases are in USD – we offer a local currency billing in a limited set of countries.' · report
• Perplexity Pro AI
  No INR price published by Perplexity. The Rs 17,000 figure circulating in India is Airtel's marketing valuation of the giveaway, not a Perplexity price. · report

What we could not verify — and why

Publishing this list is part of the methodology. A price index that only shows what it managed to find is a marketing asset; one that shows what it missed is a dataset.

• Sun NXT OTT
  subscribe page returns HTTP 403; app listing has no IAP section
• Discovery+ India OTT
  no evidence of a standalone India service and no official page found; unresolved
• aha / hoichoi / Lionsgate Play / MUBI / Crunchyroll / Chaupal / ManoramaMAX OTT
  official pricing pages are JS-rendered SPAs or geo-serve USD; only raw app-store SKU lists readable, which mix current and legacy SKUs
• Google One storage tiers (India) Cloud
  one.google.com renders prices client-side; only the free 15 GB tier is in the HTML
• Google Workspace (India) Productivity
  intl/en_in pricing page served currency placeholders with no amounts
• Adobe Creative Cloud (India) Productivity
  India plans page returned unrendered template variables instead of prices
• Canva (India) Productivity
  canva.com/en_in/pricing returns an 'Unsupported client' wall to non-browser agents
• Zoho Workplace / Zoho One (India) Productivity
  tier names render, amounts absent. Zoho One page states 'Zoho One prices do not include VAT'
• LinkedIn Premium (India) Productivity
  linkedin.com/premium/products is robots.txt-disallowed
• Dropbox / Grammarly / Coursera / Slack / Figma (India) Productivity
  no INR list price exists on their public pages; they bill Indian customers in USD or localise only at checkout
• JioSaavn Pro / Gaana / Kuku FM / Pocket FM Music
  robots-disallowed, 403, login-walled or redirect-looping
• Duolingo Super / Zoom Pro (India) Productivity
  price blocks not present in fetched HTML
• ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity INR prices AI
  no vendor publishes an INR figure. OpenAI confirms INR and UPI billing is supported but states 'All purchases are in USD' with local-currency billing in a limited set of countries

The common cause across most of these: pricing rendered client-side by JavaScript, geo-gated to Indian IP addresses, or blocked by robots.txt. These are resolvable and are the first priority for version 1.1.

Discontinued and closed plans

Price roundups across the Indian web still quote several of these as live. They are not.

• ALTT (formerly ALTBalaji) OTT
  Discontinued 2025 following a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting directive · source
• Spotify Premium Duo Music
  Closed to new signups; 'only available for users that signed up before 13 November 2025' · source
• Spotify Premium Family Music
  Closed to new signups; 'only available for users that signed up before 13 November 2025' · source
• Spotify Premium Lite Music
  Discontinued in India May 2026, roughly six months after launch · source
• Wynk Music Music
  Shut down by Airtel in December 2024; replaced by an Apple Music partnership · source
• Apple Music Voice Plan Music
  Retired globally 1 November 2023; absent from the India page · source
• Microsoft Copilot Pro (standalone) AI
  No longer listed on Microsoft's India individuals pricing page; Copilot is bundled into Microsoft 365 tiers · source
• Amazon Prime Music Music
  Downgraded to ad-supported with no offline playback when Amazon Music Unlimited launched in India on 2 June 2026 · source

Licence and citation

This dataset is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may republish, chart, or build on any part of it — including commercially — with attribution. Journalists are welcome to request a custom cut of the data.

Suggested citation:
PremiumKing Subscription Price Index (India), v1.0, 9 August 2026. https://premiumking.in/subscription-price-index-india/

Changelog

• v1.0 — 9 August 2026
  First public release. 93 price points across 26 services. 62 rows at HIGH confidence, 31 at MEDIUM. 13 historical price changes verified.