Grandfathering

A streaming service raises its monthly price and leaves everyone who subscribed before the change where they were. Three price increases later, the base holds four different prices for the same product, the oldest cohort is paying about half of list, and nobody remembers agreeing to keep it that way forever.

The stores shape how much choice a publisher has here. A price increase on an existing subscription generally requires notifying the subscriber, and depending on the platform and the size of the increase it may require their explicit agreement, with non-response treated as a decline that ends the subscription. That mechanic quietly turns a pricing change into a retention event: the notice reaches people who had not thought about the subscription in a year, which is exactly the population most likely to reconsider it. Grandfathering avoids the event and defers the revenue, and both effects are real.

The decision worth making explicitly is the duration. Permanent grandfathering is a promise the business will still be paying for a decade out. A defined window, communicated at the time of the change, keeps the goodwill and ends the liability. Either way the migration is the hard part, because it lands on subscribers who are not equivalent: a five-year subscriber on a legacy plan and a six-month subscriber both get the same notice by default, and one of them deserves a different conversation. Segmenting that notice by tenure, plan, and engagement, then measuring the churn it produces per segment rather than in aggregate, is what Campaigns coordinates. The number to watch is not how many accepted the increase but what the accepting cohort did at its next renewal.