Two Of These Fourteen Swap A Subscription For A Shop

Fourteen rows, paid service on the left, free alternative on the right, one arrow between them. Netflix to Plex, Spotify to SoundCloud, Audible to LibriVox, and so on down to the games at the bottom.

Before anything else, the footer, because it is better than most cards manage:

“Free versions are usually ad-supported or limited, and are not the same catalog as the paid service. Availability varies and services change, so check each official site.”

That sentence is correct and it covers twelve of the fourteen rows completely. You swap Netflix for Plex and you are still watching films; they are simply different films, with adverts. Nothing more needs saying.

On rows 13 and 14 it is not the catalogue that differs. It is what the thing does.

Diagram: four kinds of swap, not one

Sort the fourteen by what actually changes when you cross the arrow and the list separates cleanly.

Rows 13 and 14: what a console subscription is actually for

Xbox’s entry-level subscription and PlayStation Plus are not primarily film libraries or game catalogues. Their core function is online multiplayer on a console. That is what the money buys: the thing that lets you play with other people.

Steam’s free games and the Epic Games Store’s weekly giveaways are PC storefronts. They hand you games you keep, which is genuinely good value and genuinely free. They do not give you anything on your console, and they do not provide the service the left-hand column is selling.

So the arrow on those two rows does not mean “this does the same job for nothing”. It means “here is a different way to end up with games”. If what you wanted was to stop paying and keep playing online with your friends on the machine under your television, neither of these rows helps.

Worth being precise about one thing in fairness: free-to-play titles on console generally do not require the subscription, so there is a real free path to console multiplayer. It is just not the path these two rows point at.

Two names on the card no longer exist

The Freevee one has a twist worth pointing out. Row 3 says: stop paying for Apple TV+, watch Freevee instead. Freevee closed, and its catalogue moved into Prime Video — which row 6 lists as a paid service you should be escaping from. The free answer to one row now lives inside the paid problem of another.

That is not a gotcha so much as an illustration of why the footer’s last clause is the important one: “services change, so check each official site”. Free ad-supported streaming has consolidated hard in the last two years, and a list of its brand names ages faster than a list of its owners.

The one row in a category of its own

Row 5 is YouTube Premium → NewPipe, and it is the only row where the library on both sides is identical. NewPipe is an open-source Android client that plays YouTube content without the official app, which is also why it plays it without adverts.

That makes it different in kind from every other row here. Tubi and Pluto TV are businesses with content deals, funded by the adverts they show you. NewPipe is a different front door onto someone else’s service. YouTube’s terms address ad-blocking, and the app is not distributed through Google Play. Those are facts rather than a verdict, and worth having before you treat row 5 as the same kind of swap as row 6.

What the list is genuinely good at

Four honest caveats

1. Availability is regional and we checked none of it for you. Tubi, Pluto TV, Freevee’s successor catalogue and the Roku Channel all have different footprints by country, and a card written for one market is a different card in another. The footer says this; we are repeating it because it is the caveat most likely to bite.
2. We did not subscribe to anything to compare catalogues. The “different catalogue” claim comes from the card’s own footer and from what these services are; we have not counted titles.
3. Row 5 is reported, not ruled on. We describe what NewPipe is and note that YouTube’s terms address ad-blocking. What follows from that is a decision for the person making it, not for a blog.
4. Nothing on this list is a piracy site. That is worth saying plainly, because lists of “free alternatives” often are. Every right-hand entry here is an ad-supported service, a public-domain archive, a storefront giveaway or an open-source client. Whoever built this list was careful about that, and it deserves noting.

The one-line version

Twelve of these fourteen rows are exactly what the footer says they are — a different, ad-supported catalogue for the same activity — and the two at the bottom are not, because a console subscription buys online multiplayer and a PC storefront does not sell it.

Take rows 1 to 12 at face value and check the names: one of the services on the card closed in August 2025 and one of the subscriptions was renamed twice since 2023.