The rise of Friend Socialism

Tired: still being on your family phone plan well into your 30s. Wired: hopping onto a plan with your chosen family — your friends. You still get the financial advantage of sharing a joint subscription without the embarrassment of your mom floating the cost of your excessive TikTok habit. Let’s assume your friends are trustworthy enough to keep up on their part of the monthly payment, of course.

Americans are drowning in subscriptions. From phone plans to streaming services, fitness apps, and media, consumers are performing what feels like a constant balancing act of sign-ups (and cancellations). While many of these services are quite affordable on their own, the costs can add up pretty fast — the average US consumer pays for about five video subscriptions a month. You realize that between Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, HBO Max, and whatever else, you probably just should have gone with a cable package.

So, people figure out all sorts of ways to game the system. They stop and start free trials and share passwords among loved ones. Or they go on — and stay on — family plans with their parents, children, etc. Some people are defining family in a broader sense to divvy up costs. They’re hopping onto family plans for their cellphones, music streaming, or video content with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, sometimes bending the rules of the terms of service in the process, other times just being a little liberal in the interpretation of family.

“Word-of-mouth is a very powerful acquisition channel, and you could think of this as an extended free trial for all the freeloaders,” says Daniel McCarthy, an associate marketing professor at the University of Maryland.

More Americans are remaining single and childless. Doing life on your own, while the right choice for many people, can also increase costs. The “singles tax” means there’s no significant other to split rent with or help shoulder the burden of a vacation hotel room. Even for people who are coupled up and in family units, the rising cost of living is making all sorts of purchases more challenging. Some people are turning to a version of what I’ll call “friend socialism” to make the smaller stuff more affordable. Don’t want to pay full price for that Spotify subscription? No worries. Hop on a family plan with your college roommates. Yes, you may have to all list the same address instead of the different ones you live at now, but it’s not like there’s the Spotify Police asking you and your homeboys for DNA samples.

Getting off the family plan is seen as a milestone in the road to adulthood, but many people, because of costs and inertia, stay on. In one recent survey, about one in five American adults said they were still on their parents’ phone plans, and while that proportion has gone down slightly over the past few years, one in three people still said their parents paid for some or all of their phone bill. But while they’re typically marketed as “family” plans, there’s often nothing in the fine print that says they have to be with your relatives. T-Mobile and AT&T, for example, openly state that they can include family and friends. Some people are opting in accordingly.

You could think of this as an extended free trial for all the freeloaders.

As Nicole Nikolich and her roommate got further into their 20s and increasingly independent, they decided to join forces on a phone plan. “I was just like, we will literally save so much money if we just do this together,” she says. Nikolich, an artist who lives in Pennsylvania, jokes that she’s the “mom” of the plan, since it’s all under her name. At the end of the month, her roommate — who has since moved out — just sends over a Venmo for her portion, and she’s since added on her partner, too. “It’s been smooth sailing for years,” she says. The only hiccup was when one of them lost a phone, and they had to do a group trip to the store together to get it replaced. She would keep adding more people if it saved her money, but she thinks they’ve maxed out the savings they’d get with multiple lines. “If someone needed it, I would add them,” she says, “as long as it was one of my more responsible friends.”

Rose Petargue, who lives in Missouri, doesn’t personally know the people she shares her Nintendo Switch Online subscription with. She offered up the extra slots on her family plan on Reddit a while back, and now she shares her account with a few strangers who took her up on it. One of them lives in Turkey, another in the Caribbean. She doesn’t charge them for it — the subscription, which runs her $79.99 a year, isn’t expensive for her, and she thinks maybe it’s something they couldn’t afford on their own. The individual plans cost from $19.99 to $49.99. “There’s a community aspect to a lot of games, and it kind of occurred to me that there are some people who can’t access that portion of the gameplay,” she says. There’s really no risk to her, she says. Maybe if one of them “behaved badly” and Nintendo banned their account, but even then, she doesn’t think it would affect her. She just adds their emails to the account and that’s that.

These types of arrangements aren’t always foolproof. Friendships always risk being strained whenever money comes into play. One coworker tells me they’ve heard through the grapevine that their ex-partner stopped kicking in their portion of a group phone plan with friends. Everyone else in the arrangement makes more money, so the ex argues that the rest can afford to support them. I’ve had a YouTube TV subscription with friends added on as family for years. As it’s gotten pricier over time, going from $35 a month when I started it back in 2018 to $82.99 now, I’ve been tempted to ask people to start contributing, but it also makes me feel like a jerk.

Diane Brown, in New England, has no such qualms about feeling like a jerk when she deletes friends from the Peloton account she shares with them. She’s largely happy to give out her password to people — her daughter, her sisters, her in-laws, and her friends — as long as they create their own user account, 20 of which can be made on her subscription. But every once in a while, she’ll check in to make sure they’re still using it, and if they aren’t, she axes them and doesn’t say anything. Given the $44 cost of the monthly subscription, Brown says she doesn’t “feel badly about sharing it.” It sounds like the scheme worked out for Peloton, too: One of the friends Brown shared the account with liked it so much she wound up buying her own bike.

From a corporate perspective, it would probably be ideal that everyone pays full price for their phone plan or streaming subscription and calls it a day. But the calculation isn’t as straightforward as it may seem.

“It really depends on the company in question, the stage that they’re in, and the lock-in that they have with subscribers,” McCarthy says.

Account sharing may be a way to get people in the door. That’s part of how Netflix took hold; it allowed widespread password sharing as a way to get people hooked. It eventually cracked down on password sharing, but only once the company was making $33 billion a year and once it was sure viewers would be motivated enough to open up new subscriptions of their own.

“It’s a useful strategy to build usage, understanding and habit formation,” says Robbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant for subscription-based companies, in an email.

Allowing for account sharing may make a platform or service stickier and improve customer retention. If you and your three best friends are on a shared Verizon phone plan, are you really going to undertake the effort to switch everyone to AT&T? If you pull the plug, you’re pulling the plug on five people.

Despite their original promise to free viewers from ads, more and more paid platforms are tossing advertising in the mix, meaning eyeballs may be more important than subscription fees. A good chunk of revenue in ad-supported plans comes from advertising, and it’s better for business if multiple people are getting hit with a bunch of ads than a single person being exposed to them.

“That’s made the subscription much more about engagement and view hours as opposed to, ‘Is this person going to mail in the check?'” McCarthy says. “It’s much less like the gym model, where the best gym member pays their fee but never goes into the gym. Now, suddenly, it’s about going in all the time.”

Sharing the wealth, accounts-wise, is a way for people to save money as prices get higher and subscriptions multiply.

To be sure, companies such as Netflix and Disney are cracking down on friend socialism for a reason. Robert Fishman, a senior research analyst at MoffettNathanson, tells me it’s become an “increasing point of concern from the media companies to make sure they’re getting the appropriate subscription dollars from different households.” In an April survey from Pew Research Center, 26% of US streaming users said they used someone else’s password, including 47% of the 18-to-29 group.

“Looking backwards, the traditional media companies had to find the right balance of trying to have as many people as possible engaged in their content,” he says. “But it’s more recently shifted to ensuring that they’re getting paid for that viewership.”

From a consumer perspective, it’s hard to feel too guilty about playing it a little fast and loose on account sharing. Businesses are the ones who siloed content off and monetized every little thing in the first place. In turn, people find ways to fudge. Perhaps the terms of service on a subscription specify everyone has to be in a family or live in the same household, but it turns out as long as you all are in the same-ish geographic area — or just input the same address — it works just fine. Some groups develop elaborate plans for taking out and sharing various subscriptions, involving spreadsheets and coordination. Others keep it pretty simple. One colleague tells me she and her husband share a YouTube Premium subscription with a bunch of other friends. The company allows up to six accounts total on the plan, and they’re all supposed to be in the same household, but YouTube apparently isn’t checking. All they have to do is send over their portion to the original account holder once a year.

Sharing the wealth, accounts-wise, is a way for people to save money as prices get higher and subscriptions multiply. Across groups of friends, it’s a way to ease the financial burden and, sometimes, it can be a little fun, too. The only way everyone can discuss “Love Island USA” in the group chat is if they’ve all got access to Peacock. I share my Peloton account with a friend, and I like taking a peek to see what workouts she has (or hasn’t) been up to.

On a more serious note, not everyone has a family to share the family plan with, for a variety of reasons. Or, they’d just rather not wrangle their dad into an Apple Music subscription when he doesn’t even have an iPhone, or has only listened to the same Bob Seger CD on a loop in his car for a decade.

Some companies are coming around to that. A spokesperson for AT&T tells me they know families can “mean a lot of different things,” whether the traditional understanding or not. “We are perfectly fine with customers joining our multi-line and family plans, no matter how they’re related (blood, marriage, friends, co-workers, neighbors, roommates, etc.),” they say. AT&T has gone as far as to launch a payment tool to make it easier for people to split their plan costs.

People may not be able to share their mortgage cost with the friend who lives across the country, but they can add them to their Strava subscription. The “family plan” can mean whatever family you choose.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.