While still in Germany, I signed up for a YouTube Premium family plan: €23.99, cheaper than two individual subscriptions. This year I moved to the Philippines — while still keeping my apartment in Germany.
Without warning, Google revoked Premium for a family member. No notification, no support contact, even though we’re paying customers. I know the policies. But their application led to an absurd result: instead of one family plan, there are now two individual subscriptions — €12.99 in Germany, 159 PHP in the Philippines. Together, roughly €15.50.
I’m now saving money. Google is losing revenue. Nobody got what they wanted.
Streaming services built their family plans for sedentary households. “Family” in their logic means: one location, one Wi-Fi, one IP range. In a world of remote work, international relationships, and split homes, that’s an anachronism.
Fraud prevention is meant to stop friends from sharing a subscription. Understandable. But the detection systems can’t distinguish between illegitimate account sharing and families that live internationally. The result: legitimate customers are treated like fraudsters. The actual fraudsters use VPNs.
My case costs Google about €8 per month. A support interaction would have cost more than the annual loss. With billions of users, individual cases are statistical noise — as long as they don’t become a PR problem.
That’s rational behavior for a platform of this scale. But aggregated across thousands of similar cases? Expat communities, international couples, remote workers? At some point, the noise adds up.
I would have happily kept paying €23.99. Now I pay less and Google gets less. Rigid rules were meant to protect revenue — here they destroyed it.
I’m the involuntary winner of a policy that was supposed to punish me. Google lost without noticing. And I’m saving money without having wanted to.
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December 13, 2025 
carl-hirndrehe 