People who subscribe to The Weather Channel through its smart TV app are getting a bigger bill: the service now costs $5 a month or $50 a year, up from $3 monthly or $30 annually.
Cord Cutters News reported the change Tuesday. Archived copies of the app’s website in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine show the old pricing was still listed as recently as April 2026.
The math is not subtle. The monthly plan is up 66.7 percent. The annual plan now costs $20 more than before, a 66.7 percent increase there, too. For a service built around one legacy cable channel, that is a chunky ask.
The app runs on Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Samsung TV platforms. It lets subscribers watch The Weather Channel’s live television feed without buying a cable or satellite package. It also includes on-demand programming, local forecasts, maps, radar and weather news.
The Weather Channel launched the TV app in May 2022 as a direct subscription route for viewers who wanted the channel’s coverage without a pay-TV bundle. Allen Media Group, which bought The Weather Channel in 2018, owns the channel and the app.
A smaller service at a price once pitched for a bigger one
The new $5 monthly price lands where Allen Media Group previously said it wanted to price a different product, The Weather Channel Plus. In a 2021 press release, the company described that planned service as a bundle with more than 50 news and entertainment streaming channels, targeted for launch in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Allen Media Group also said at the time that it expected The Weather Channel Plus to reach 30 million subscribers within its first five years. That service did not become available. The current paid streaming product is instead the narrower Weather Channel TV app, which does not include the dozens of additional channels described in the 2021 announcement.
The price increase puts the app in a crowded and awkward corner of the weather business. Viewers can still get weather information from local TV stations, websites, mobile apps and connected home devices. Some of those options are free, and many are already on the phone in a pocket rather than behind another app icon on a television.
There is also a branding wrinkle. Weather.com and The Weather Channel mobile apps for iOS and Android are not owned by Allen Media Group. They belong to Francisco Partners, the private equity firm that owns those digital properties separately from the cable network and TV streaming app.
That split means the familiar Weather Channel name points to different businesses depending on where a user taps. The TV app’s new pricing makes that distinction more expensive for subscribers who want the live channel specifically, rather than forecasts from the broader pile of weather services competing for attention.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
