Aaron Scott

A new Starlink customer signed up at $130 a month. He spent a full day getting the dish installed and every device in his house working. Less than a week later, an email arrived. His plan was going up to $156 a month. The reason SpaceX gave was local demand, not anything he did: the more of his neighbors on Starlink, the less network capacity there is to go around. That one email is a small piece of a much bigger shift in how Starlink prices home internet. Read the last three weeks of news together. Oct 20. SpaceX reports that Starlink now has 13.6 million consumer subscribers, up 1.6 million in a single quarter. That fell short of the 2.3 million Wall Street analysts were expecting. Average monthly revenue per subscriber: $69, down from $83 a year earlier. Oct 29. Starlink emails Residential customers in select areas. From now on, prices follow local network capacity and demand, and they’re reviewed roughly every quarter. Early November. The new prices spread well beyond the Midwest, where the experiment began. Same dish. Same plan. Same satellites. Residential Max is listed at $104 at one address and $156 at another. New customers in New York, San Francisco and Boston are being offered 30% to 50% off. For customers who got a hike, it’s the second one this year, after a $5 to $10 increase announced in May. Some have posted their complaints straight to Elon Musk. Others say they plan to cancel. Now look at the rest of the broadband industry. Comcast offers a price lock of up to five years. T-Mobile’s new 5-Gig fiber tier comes with a ten-year lock. Starlink is going the other direction: your price can change roughly every three months. None of the three broadband experts PCMag consulted had come across another internet provider that reprices on an ongoing basis like this. The logic is simple. The satellites over any one area can only carry so much traffic, so every added subscriber means less for everyone else there. Starlink’s answer is to let price do the rationing. The first new prices land on billing cycles that start on or after Nov 30. Some subscribers say they’ve already won credits or discounts just by asking Starlink’s support chat. At least one says the discount vanished a couple of days later. Here’s what changed, why SpaceX is doing it, how to check your exact price in two minutes, what people are doing about it, and the one competitor that could change the whole picture 🧵