When the Covid lockdowns stretched on for the better part of a year, I found myself living on Netflix. That was also when I finally looked properly at what I was paying for it. In the USA, the lowest tier was $9.99 a month — a whopping $120 for the year. For the quality of shows they were putting out, that felt like an unreasonable price. So began a new research project.
The goal
Cut the cost per month by at least half — no more than $5 a month, or about $60 a year — and end up with better shows than I had access to before. I knew going in that this would be hard to pull off without a genuinely good VPN.
Step 1: Picking the VPN
I spent about two months researching well-reputed VPN services before landing on NordVPN as the cheapest option that didn’t feel like a compromise. It also throws in some genuinely great features for the times you want to hold on to your anonymity — and for the times you’re happy to trade it for convenience: random MAC address generation, split tunneling, and plenty more.
Priced against Windscribe, CyberGhost and ExpressVPN, it came out ahead. Two years plus two free months worked out to roughly $2.60 per month for me — comfortably inside the budget for this project.
Step 2: Netflix is cheaper elsewhere — but not for you
With the VPN settled, I turned to Netflix itself. It turns out the service is quite cheap in select countries, with India and Pakistan being the cheapest of the lot.
So I pointed the VPN at one of those locations and tried to set up a new account. It does not work that way. My travel visa card was declined at payment, and when I spoke to a representative he explained why: they only accept credit cards issued locally. The billing address and the issuing bank both have to be in the country you’re signing up in.
Step 3: The way in — regional gift cards
The only other payment method Netflix accepts is a gift card. And every country has its own: a gift card bought in the US cannot be redeemed on an account created in India, and so on down the list. Which meant the whole plan now hinged on finding a gift card from a cheap region.
Step 4: The hunt
I went looking for international Netflix cards in the good ol’ internet, and eventually found a third-party online gaming store selling cards from Turkey — there were none for India or Pakistan. Once I ran the numbers, this turned out to be a pretty good find. They were offering 200 TL (Turkish lira) for about $12 USD, and Turkish Netflix was running at 45.99 TL per month, which came to $2.42 a month. Jackpot. I was effectively buying four to five months of subscription for twelve dollars.
The transaction itself was a bit nerve-racking at first, since I didn’t fully trust the store. I paid through PayPal to stay safe — it’s easily refunded, no questions asked, if the merchant disappoints. The gift card code landed in my inbox about five minutes later.
Step 5: Putting it together
The rest was a piece of cake. Fire up the trusty VPN, open an incognito browser for good measure, head to Netflix.com, create a new account in Turkey, and redeem the gift card code. All set.
Then I switched the VPN off — and was still able to watch all the US shows. As a bonus, I could also pull up some great anime through NordVPN’s obfuscated servers in Japan.
The final math
| Item | Cost per month |
|---|---|
| NordVPN (2 years + 2 months free) | $2.60 |
| Netflix Turkey (45.99 TL) | $2.42 |
| New total | ~$5.02 (~$60/year) |
| What I was paying before (US basic tier) | $9.99 ($120/year) |
Was it worth it?
The whole setup ended up costing a hair over $5 a month — so I landed just barely on the wrong side of my own target, and cut the bill roughly in half.
The one real catch is that you have to buy in bulk: twelve months of VPN at a time, and four months of Netflix at a time. But for half the price and a wider catalogue, it’s worth it — especially if you’ve got good college buddies to split it with.
A note on the numbers: all prices, exchange rates and signup rules above are as I found them in 2022, and every one of them has moved since. Worth pointing out too that paying for a cheaper region this way is against Netflix’s terms of use, so treat this as a write-up of what I did rather than a recommendation.