As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, including a fee if you add Starz through Prime Video Channels using a link here. Starz, HBO Max and Paramount pay us nothing, and one of the recommendations below is that a lot of readers should pay Starz nothing either.
Starz costs $11.99 a month or $69.99 a year, read from Starz’s own signup page and its help centre on 15 August 2026.
Finding those two numbers is harder than it should be, and that’s the first thing worth knowing about this subscription. Starz’s signup page leads with $5.99 a month for three months and an annual offer of $29.99 prepaid for twelve months. The standard monthly rate appears once, in the offer’s fine print at the bottom of the page. The standard annual rate appears only as a struck-through number next to the promo.
We flagged this in our roundup of Prime Video Channels — at the time we couldn’t find Starz’s post-promo rate at all and told readers to go and find it before subscribing. Here it is: $11.99 a month, $69.99 a year. Both confirmed on Starz’s own pages today.
The annual discount is the biggest in streaming, and Starz undersells it
Almost every subscription’s annual plan is priced at “two months free” — around a 17% saving. We’ve laid out why that matters in annual vs monthly billing: a 17% discount only pays off if you keep the service for about ten months, so most annual plans are a bet on your own future attention span.
Starz is the exception, and it isn’t close:
$11.99 × 12 = $143.88 paying monthly.
The annual plan is $69.99.
That’s $73.89 saved — a 51% discount.
Divide it the other way and you get the number that actually decides this: $69.99 ÷ $11.99 = 5.8 months. The annual plan pays for itself before the sixth month. Anywhere else in streaming that break-even sits at ten.
Starz’s own help centre describes annual billing as “like paying for ten months and getting two free.” That framing hasn’t kept up with the price. At $11.99 a month, $69.99 buys you closer to six months’ worth of monthly billing and hands you the other six. It is unusual to find a company understating its own discount, and it means anyone comparing plans on the strength of that sentence will underrate the annual one.
| How you pay | Cost | Effective per month | Break-even |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly, standard | $11.99/mo | $11.99 | — |
| 12 months at monthly | $143.88 | $11.99 | — |
| Annual, standard | $69.99/yr | $5.83 | 5.8 months |
| Monthly promo | $5.99/mo × 3, then $11.99 | $5.99 for 3 months | — |
| Annual promo | $29.99 for 12 months | $2.50 | 2.5 months |
Which offer to take, in one calculation
The two promotions are not equivalent, and the cheaper-looking one is usually the worse buy.
Three months at the promo rate: $5.99 × 3 = $17.97, then it rolls to $11.99 a month.
The annual promo: $29.99 for twelve months.
The difference is $12.02 — for nine extra months.
Unless you are certain you want Starz for a single specific series and will cancel the day it ends, the annual promo is better at any duration past about three and a half months. It also removes the failure mode that costs people the most money here: the monthly promo rolls automatically to $11.99 after three months, which Starz states plainly in its terms and which nobody remembers in November. That is the exact pattern behind the subscriptions people forget they’re paying for.
Two cautions on the promos. Starz’s terms limit the offer to new subscribers and former subscribers who re-sign up through starz.com, and state explicitly that it does not include a free trial. And the terms say the offer rolls to month-to-month at the then-current price — currently $11.99 — once it completes. We could not confirm on Starz’s own pages whether a prepaid $29.99 year renews at the $69.99 annual rate or reverts to monthly billing, so set a reminder for month eleven and check.
What you’re actually paying for
Starz is a narrow service, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. It’s a premium channel that became an app: a rotating film slate plus a small number of returning originals that people subscribe specifically to watch. The titles Starz itself puts on its signup page today are the Power universe (Power Book III: Raising Kanan), Fightland, The Listeners, Michael, and S.W.A.T. Exiles, which its own countdown clock dates to 25 September.
Three things it does better than the big catalogues, all of them stated on Starz’s own signup page: it is ad-free at every price — there is no cheap ad tier because there are no ads — it allows downloads for offline viewing, and it permits simultaneous streams on more than one device.
That first one matters more than it looks when you compare prices.
| Service | Cheapest plan | Ads? | 12 months at monthly | Annual plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starz | $11.99/mo | No ads | $143.88 | $69.99 |
| HBO Max Basic With Ads | $10.99/mo | Ads | $131.88 | $109.99 |
| HBO Max Standard | $18.49/mo | No ads | $221.88 | $184.99 |
| Paramount+ Essential | $8.99/mo | Ads | $107.88 | — |
| Paramount+ Premium | $13.99/mo | No ads except live TV | $167.88 | — |
All figures read from each company’s own site on 15 August 2026. Starz’s annual plan is $69.99 against $184.99 for the cheapest genuinely ad-free year on that list — HBO Max Standard. Even Paramount+ Premium, the closest ad-free competitor on monthly price, costs $167.88 over a year paid monthly — and as we’ve argued, most people buying Paramount+ should pay monthly and cancel in February anyway. On price per ad-free year, nothing here comes close to Starz.
What Starz cannot do is be your only subscription. There is no meaningful kids’ catalogue, no live sport, no deep back-catalogue to browse. It is a service you buy for four or five specific shows, which is precisely why the annual break-even matters: two seasons of a weekly-release drama, at roughly three months each, is $35.97 × 2 = $71.94 paid monthly — already more than the $69.99 annual plan.
Subscribing through Amazon instead
Starz is available as a Prime Video Channel, which bills it through your Amazon account and puts the cancel button in the same list as everything else Amazon charges you for.
We could not confirm the standalone Starz price through Prime Video Channels. Amazon’s storefront doesn’t publish it in a form we can read, and we won’t restate a figure we haven’t seen on Amazon’s own page. Two things we could read there on 15 August 2026, both rounded because Amazon requires exact prices to come from its API and we don’t have that access: Amazon was promoting a Crunchyroll-and-Starz bundle at about $17 a month, marked down from a combined roughly $22, and Starz titles on the storefront carried a free trial offer. That second point is a real difference — Starz’s direct promotion explicitly excludes a trial, and Amazon’s route appears to include one. Note also that channels are billed monthly, so the $69.99 annual price is a direct-from-Starz option only, and a channel subscription requires an active Prime membership.
The verdict
Skip Starz entirely if you want a service the whole household browses. It has no kids’ catalogue, no sport, and a library you will exhaust. If you can’t name two shows on it right now, $69.99 a year is exactly the subscription this site exists to talk you out of.
Don’t pay monthly if you’ll watch more than one season a year. The break-even is 5.8 months. Two three-month series runs cost $71.94 monthly against $69.99 for the whole year — you’d be paying more for less.
Don’t take the $5.99 monthly promo unless you have one show in mind and a cancellation reminder already set. Twelve months at $29.99 costs $12.02 more than three months at $5.99, and it can’t quietly roll to $11.99 in month four.
The annual plan at $69.99 is right for you if you follow the Power universe or Starz’s original slate, you want ad-free viewing, and you’d otherwise be paying $184.99 for an ad-free year of HBO Max. On cost per ad-free year it’s the cheapest premium subscription in American streaming, and the promotional $29.99 makes that lopsided.
Verified 15 August 2026. Starz’s $11.99 monthly, $69.99 annual, $5.99-for-three-months and $29.99-for-twelve-months figures are exact and were read from starz.com’s own signup page and its help centre on that date. HBO Max and Paramount+ prices are exact and were read from those companies’ own sites the same day; Paramount+ does not display its annual rates without progressing through signup, so no annual figure is given for it here. The standalone Starz price through Prime Video Channels is explicitly unconfirmed. The Crunchyroll-and-Starz bundle figures are Amazon’s own, rounded by policy. Promotional rates change; confirm every number at signup.