Subtrakr Weekly Roundup #47

Microsoft is cutting the cloud storage in its Family and Premium plans by up to two thirds without cutting the price. Spotify now checks that Family plan members live at the same address, with a rotating QR code and a 12 month ban for anyone who fails. Amazon raised Prime in Australia by up to 30 percent. X folded Grok, Cursor, and X Premium into one set of tiers, and Kindle Unlimited became Kindle+ with AI-narrated audiobooks.

The pattern this week is that the plan you pay for changes shape around you. Sometimes the price moves. More often the price stays and what it buys gets smaller, stricter, or harder to compare.

Microsoft 365 Family drops from 6 TB to 2 TB

Microsoft 365 Family and Premium used to give each of up to six people 1 TB of OneDrive storage, or 6 TB in total. The new model is a single 2 TB pool shared by everyone on the plan. Microsoft 365 Pro moves to a 5 TB shared pool. A fully used Family or Premium plan loses up to 4 TB, and a fully used Pro plan up to 1 TB.

New, upgraded, and repurchased subscriptions got the new pool from 8 October. Existing subscribers keep their current storage until the first renewal on or after 2 May 2027, and Microsoft says it will send reminders before then. Microsoft calls the pool more flexible, since one person can now go past 1 TB if others use less. Two members with full 1 TB drives would already fill the whole plan.

Check how much your household stores today. If the total is under 2 TB, nothing changes for you. If it is above, you have until your 2027 renewal to clean up, buy extra storage, split people onto individual plans, or turn off auto-renew and move the files elsewhere.

Spotify checks where Family members live

Spotify Premium Family has always required members to share a home. It now enforces that with a QR code shown on the plan manager's phone, which each member must scan with their own device. The code refreshes every few seconds, so a screenshot sent to someone elsewhere does not work. Some users report getting around it by sharing their screen on a video call, and some report being asked to verify more than once.

A member who gets the request has seven days to complete it. Anyone who misses the deadline or fails the scan drops to the ad-supported Free tier and cannot join any Family or Duo plan for 12 months. An individual Premium subscription remains available. Spotify tried GPS check-ins in 2018 and address checks in 2019, and pulled back both times after privacy complaints. This version needs no location data, only physical presence.

Spotify is also raising prices in Sweden and Denmark. Disney+ is doing the same in both countries, adding SEK 20 in Sweden and DKK 20 in Denmark to each plan. New Disney+ accounts pay the higher price from 14 October and existing accounts from 18 November.

If you share a Family plan with a parent, sibling, or friend at another address, plan for the cost of an individual subscription. A Family plan split six ways becomes one Premium bill per person once the check reaches you.

Prime costs more in Australia, Kindle Unlimited gets a new name

Amazon Prime in Australia went from A$9.99 to A$12.99 a month and from A$79 to A$99 a year on 21 October. New members pay the new prices now. Existing members move over at the first renewal on or after 25 November. Amazon says the increase reflects the growing range of benefits, but the benefits list itself did not change. Prime Video still shows ads unless you pay another A$2 a month.

Twelve monthly payments now cost A$155.88, which makes the A$99 annual plan the cheaper option by more than A$56 for anyone keeping Prime all year. This is the second increase since Prime launched in Australia in 2018 at A$6.99 a month.

In the US, Amazon renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+. The price stays at $11.99 a month and existing subscriptions carry over. The main addition is a larger audiobook library, much of it narrated by Amazon's Virtual Voice AI tool, which self-published authors can switch on for their books. Audiobooks are US only for now. If you value human narration, check the narrator details of a title before you start it.

X merges Grok, Cursor, and Premium

X now sells one membership that covers X Premium features, the Grok assistant, the Cursor coding tool, and its agent assistant. The tiers are Free, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100, and Ultra at $200 a month. Grok and Cursor draw from one shared usage allowance. Claude and GPT models inside Cursor are available on Premium and up, but they are billed separately at API rates from the first request.

Reports say the $30 Premium tier covers what used to require SuperGrok, Cursor Pro, and X Premium+, which together would cost about $90 more a month. Current SuperGrok, Cursor, and X Premium subscribers keep their pricing for now and can switch by linking accounts. The feature mix is not identical, so compare tier by tier before you move.

The bundle arrives as AI add-on costs keep stacking up elsewhere. A BigGo analysis counts AI surcharges across Zoom, Adobe, Slack, Microsoft 365, Notion, and Dropbox, often a few dollars to tens of dollars a month each, sitting on top of a chatbot plan. A $19 monthly add-on is about $230 a year. OpenAI's agent product now has tiers at $200 and $500 a month, and analysts expect many paid AI add-ons to be dropped or folded into base plans within a few years.

The practical question for each one is whether it does something your main AI subscription cannot. Summarising a PDF or transcribing a call rarely needs a second paid tool.

What to do this week

Look up the date your Microsoft 365 plan renews after 2 May 2027 and how much storage your household uses today. If you are on a Spotify Family plan away from the manager's home, budget for an individual plan. Australian Prime members who pay monthly can save by switching to annual before their November renewal. If you pay for SuperGrok, Cursor, and X Premium separately, price out the new $30 tier.

Then count your AI charges, including the ones hidden inside other apps. Storage pools, household checks, and AI tiers all make plans harder to compare on price alone, so write down what each one includes before the next renewal changes it again.

Sources

• Microsoft 365 subscribers set to lose up to 4 TB of OneDrive storage
• Spotify Launches Aggressive Crackdown on Family Plan Sharing with Dynamic QR Codes
• Spotify tightens Family plan checks
• Disney Plus and Spotify raise prices in Sweden and Denmark
• Amazon Prime just got more expensive in Australia. Here's what you'll pay
• Amazon unveils Kindle+ subscription, a rebrand with more audiobooks
• X Bundles Grok, Cursor & Premium Into One Subscription
• AI Subscriptions Pile Up as Users Face Monthly Bills of Hundreds of Dollars