It can be hard to keep track of all the online subscription fees I’m paying these days—whether for films, music, or my ongoing obsession with Final Fantasy XIV: Online, which I simply can’t quit. For the low cost of a few dollars a month, I get to enjoy the fantasy of being a magical cat girl exploring Eorzea and beyond.

However, YouTube now aims to further complicate things with a new budget tier, YouTube Premium Lite, launching at $7.99 per month, which offers fewer features than the standard version. Previously, I resisted the urge to subscribe to YouTube Premium at $13.99 monthly while enduring those pesky ads whenever I open the app on my consoles.

The Lite tier promises “most videos ad-free,” whereas the conventional Premium tier is genuinely ad-free, providing unrestricted access while losing YouTube Music and background playback features. If you already subscribe to a music service like Spotify, this could be a moot point for you.

In recent news, YouTube announced its total subscriber base for Premium and Music has reached 125 million globally, indicating that I’m not the only one frustrated by those long ads. While this cheaper plan debuts in the U.S., it has already rolled out in Australia, Germany, and Thailand as part of a pilot program.

Given that ads generated $10.4 billion for YouTube in just three months of 2024, it’s hardly a surprise they’re expanding their subscription offerings. As viewers spend nearly a billion hours daily on YouTube, it seems my only recourse is to continue voicing my complaints about the platform’s incessant ads. Thankfully, YouTube’s previous experiment with ads during video pauses seems to be over.

YouTube projects that this new Lite tier will enable better revenue fountains for its creators, though many remain skeptical about the benefits to content creators, given that similar ad-free services like Spotify barely compensate even successful artists.