As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, including a fee if you add discovery+ or HBO Max through Prime Video Channels using a link here. That includes HBO Max, which we recommend over discovery+ below — so treat that recommendation with the scepticism it deserves and check the maths, which is all shown. The direct links to discoveryplus.com, hbomax.com and The Roku Channel pay us nothing.
discovery+ sells two plans: $5.99 a month with limited ads, and $9.99 a month ad-free. Both figures were read on 23 August 2026 from discovery+’s own plan picker and confirmed against its help centre article “discovery+ plans and prices”, which state the same numbers.
Annualised, that’s $71.88 and $119.88. There is no third tier, no annual plan, and no discount for paying ahead — the signup routes are literally named ad-lite-monthly and ad-free-monthly. Every subscriber pays by the month, forever.
That last detail is the most important thing on this page, and we’ll come back to it, because it turns discovery+ from a subscription into something much cheaper if you use it correctly.
What $5.99 actually buys
discovery+ says a subscription includes more than 70,000 episodes: HGTV, Food Network, TLC, ID, Discovery Channel, plus material from Magnolia Network, OWN and CNN, and its own originals. Both plans carry identical content — the help centre is explicit that “both discovery+ plans have the same content and are available on all supported devices.”
So the $4-a-month gap between the plans buys exactly two things:
- No ads.
- Downloads — and only on mobile. The help centre restricts offline viewing to Ad-Free subscribers on iPhone, iPad, Android and Fire tablets, up to 100 titles at a time. There is no download on a TV or a computer at any price.
| Plan | Monthly | Per year | Ads | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| discovery+ | $5.99 | $71.88 | Limited ads | No |
| discovery+ (Ad-Free) | $9.99 | $119.88 | None | Mobile only, 100 titles |
Both include a 7-day free trial for new subscribers.
Two things you might expect are gone. discovery+ Channels — the linear, always-on channel feature — has been discontinued; the help centre confirms it. And there is no student or military discount: the student offer stopped taking new subscribers on 1 June 2023, and the help centre states there is no current military offer. If you are on a legacy military rate, note the warning in that same article: cancel it and it cannot be reinstated.
The $48 question
Removing ads costs $4.00 a month, or $48.00 a year. That is the whole decision on tier, and it’s worth sizing against what other services charge for the same upgrade.
Removing ads on discovery+: $9.99 − $5.99 = $4.00 a month.
Removing ads on HBO Max: $18.49 − $10.99 = $7.50 a month.
By that measure discovery+’s ad-free step is cheap. But the comparison that actually matters runs the other way, and it’s brutal.
HBO Max Basic with Ads is $10.99 a month, or $109.99 for a year — exact figures, read from HBO Max’s own plan page on 23 August 2026. HBO Max’s own pages list HGTV, Food Network and TLC among the brands it carries, and its catalogue is full of HGTV-branded titles.
A year of discovery+ Ad-Free: $119.88.
A year of HBO Max with ads: $109.99.
HBO Max is $9.89 cheaper — and it comes with HBO attached.
That is the single calculation to run before you subscribe. The lifestyle-and-true-crime catalogue is the reason people buy discovery+, and a meaningful chunk of it sits inside a service that costs less per year than the ad-free discovery+ plan. If you’re weighing the $9.99 tier, you’re almost certainly looking at the wrong service — see is HBO Max worth it for whether that one earns its keep. If you already pay for Prime, HBO Max is also sold through Prime Video Channels, which keeps it on the same bill as everything else you stream.
One honest caveat: neither company publishes a title-by-title overlap, so we can’t tell you what share of those 70,000 episodes is duplicated on HBO Max. What’s confirmed at source is that the brands and a large volume of their shows appear on both. Check the specific series you care about in HBO Max’s search before you cancel anything.
Use the missing annual plan as a feature
Most streamers dangle an annual plan and a “two months free” discount. discovery+ doesn’t have one, and that removes the trap we describe in annual vs monthly billing — you cannot accidentally prepay for a year you won’t use.
It also means cancelling is cheap, and that changes the arithmetic completely:
Watching a season of a show over six weeks, then cancelling: two payments of $5.99 = $11.98.
Leaving it running for a year: $71.88.
Saving: $59.90 — 83% of the annual cost.
Even the ad-free plan works this way: three months of heavy watching is $29.97, against $119.88 for the year. Because there’s nothing to prepay and no annual discount to forfeit, a subscriber who resubscribes twice a year for six weeks at a time pays $23.96 and sees everything new.
This is a catalogue you dip into, not one that releases a must-watch weekly. Treated as a standing charge it is exactly the sort of line item people forget — the pattern behind subscriptions you’re still paying for. Treated as a six-week rental, $5.99 is genuinely good value.
Buying it through Amazon, and the trap in doing so
discovery+ is available as a Prime Video Channel, confirmed on discovery+’s own help centre, with a 7-day trial for new customers. Billing consolidates into your Amazon account, which is the general argument we make for Prime Video Channels.
Two warnings, both from discovery+’s own documentation.
First: a Prime Video Channels subscription does not give you the discovery+ app. The help centre is blunt — you stream through Prime Video only. Since downloads live in the discovery+ app, buying the $9.99 ad-free tier through Amazon means paying $48 a year for ad removal and getting none of the offline viewing that half the upgrade is supposed to buy.
Second: you cannot change plan on a channel subscription. Amazon’s route is cancel, wait for it to expire, then resubscribe.
We could not confirm the Prime Video Channels price for discovery+. Amazon returns a 503 to automated requests, so we won’t print a figure we haven’t seen on Amazon’s own page — check it against the $5.99 and $9.99 above before subscribing. A channel also requires an active Prime membership, about $140 a year, approximate, because Amazon’s pricing can’t be verified at source either. If you don’t already have Prime, this is not the cheap route; that trade-off is Prime Video Channels vs subscribing direct.
The same app restriction applies to The Roku Channel, which also sells both plans — billed by Roku, at a price Roku sets and discovery+ doesn’t publish.
What we couldn’t find out
How many people can watch at once. discovery+ publishes no simultaneous-stream limit on its plan picker, its plans-and-prices article, or its supported-devices article. Every other major streamer states this, and its absence matters if you’re planning to share. We’re not printing a number we haven’t seen; if household sharing is the point, test it during the 7-day trial.
The verdict
Don’t pay for discovery+ Ad-Free at $9.99. At $119.88 a year it costs more than HBO Max’s ad tier at $109.99, which carries HGTV, Food Network and TLC alongside HBO. The only readers for whom the ad-free tier makes sense are those who genuinely download to a phone for commutes or flights — and even then, not through Amazon or Roku, where the app isn’t included.
Don’t keep it running year-round. There is no annual plan to justify it and no loyalty discount to lose. A subscriber who leaves the $5.99 plan on all year for two binges has paid $71.88 for about twelve weeks of use — roughly $6.00 a week for the weeks they watched, against $2.00 a week — $23.96 in total — if they’d cancelled between them.
Don’t buy it at all if you already pay for HBO Max, until you’ve searched HBO Max for the specific shows you want. You may already own most of them.
$5.99 a month, cancelled when you’re done, is the right way to buy this. Six weeks costs $11.98, the catalogue is enormous, and nothing about the plan penalises you for leaving.
Verified 23 August 2026. Both discovery+ prices, the 7-day trial, the identical-content statement, the ad-free download restriction and 100-title limit, the discontinued Channels feature, and the withdrawn student and military offers are exact, read from discovery+’s own plan picker and help centre that day. HBO Max’s six prices are exact, from hbomax.com the same day; HGTV, Food Network and TLC appearing on HBO Max is confirmed from HBO Max’s own pages, but the title-level overlap with discovery+ is published by neither company and is not claimed here. The Prime Video Channels price is explicitly unconfirmed — Amazon blocks automated access — and the Prime figure is an approximation for the same reason. The Roku Channel price is set by Roku and not published by discovery+. No simultaneous-stream limit is published at source. Prices change; confirm at signup.