Bart Broere

Freelance Developer

Pay for the cheapest Netflix, get the most premium one

14 Feb 2019

TLDR: In this post I show how to take advantage of Netflix delivering your new subscription before your payment starts. You could do this manually, but of course "it’s more fun to compute".

Netflix has an interesting upgrade flow: Once you upgrade, you get the upgraded plan for the remainder of the billing period. You only start paying your new fee at the start of the new period.

However, if you upgrade, and downgrade in the same billing period, you’ll get the upgraded plan for the remainder of the current billing period. At the start of the new billing period, you’ll be downgraded to your original plan again. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from doing the same thing again. Therefore, if you repeat this every billing period, you can have the best plan for the lowest price.

This raises a question: “This can’t be intentional, can it?”. After I submitted a short bug report, Netflix replied that it is indeed intended behaviour:

We actually received a similar report previously about this one and [decided] that this is actually an intended functionality.

So… here’s the code, using Selenium:

import logging
from collections import namedtuple

from selenium import webdriver

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

Configuration = namedtuple('Configuration', ['username', 'password'])

config = Configuration(username='username_here',
                       password='password_here')
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.binary_location = "./headless-chromium"
browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='./chromedriver',
                           chrome_options=options)
browser.implicitly_wait(time_to_wait=10)
browser.get('https://www.netflix.com/ChangePlan')
browser.find_element_by_id('id_userLoginId').send_keys(
    config.username
)
browser.find_element_by_id('id_password').send_keys(
    config.password
)
browser.find_element_by_css_selector(
    'button.btn.login-button.btn-submit.btn-small'
).click()
try:
    message = browser.find_element_by_css_selector(
        'div.ui-message-contents'
    ).text
    logging.info('Page contains infobox (probably stating that Netflix '
                 'has already been upgraded this month')
    logging.info(message)
    logging.info('Nothing to do left')
    quit(0)
except TimeoutError:
    # The upgrade has not been done this month yet, because there's no
    # infobox saying so
    current_plan = browser.find_element_by_css_selector(
        'li.selected > div > h2 > div > div > span.plan-name'
    ).text
    logging.info(f'Currently the {current_plan} is selected')
    plans = browser.find_elements_by_css_selector('span.plan-name')
    # Now we click the premium plan (the exact term here may be
    # language dependent)
    for plan in plans:
        if plan.text == 'Premium':
            plan.click()
    browser.find_element_by_css_selector(
        'button.btn.save-plan-button.btn-blue.btn-small'
    ).click()
    browser.find_element_by_css_selector(
        'button.btn.modal-action-button.btn-blue.btn-small'
    ).click()
    logging.info('Upgraded to Premium')
    # Now we downgrade to our original plan
    browser.get('https://www.netflix.com/ChangePlan')
    for plan in plans:
        if plan.text == current_plan:
            plan.click()
    browser.find_element_by_css_selector(
        'button.btn.save-plan-button.btn-blue.btn-small'
    ).click()
    browser.find_element_by_css_selector(
        'button.btn.modal-action-button.btn-blue.btn-small'
    ).click()
    logging.info("Downgraded to the original plan again")

Of course this trick has to be deployed to AWS Lambda. We can’t be bothered to do this each month 🙈. I am working on that using Selenium and serverless Chrome.

Disclaimer: This code may or may not do what you and I expect. Run it at your own risk. In the worst case, it may actually upgrade your account, without doing the downgrade.

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