What Is YouTube Premium Lite—and Should You Subscribe to It?

YouTube doesn’t charge a cent for hosting all of your uploaded videos, showing them to the wider world, or letting you spend all day streaming content made by others. What it does do is show you a whole lot of advertising in an attempt to make back some of its data storage costs—which, based on the flood of ads we all have to endure, are presumably astronomical.

By subscribing to YouTube Premium and now YouTube Premium Lite, you can remove those ads for good, across all your devices. As the cheaper option, the Lite package may seem like the best deal, and it will be for some.

Here’s how much you have to pay for YouTube Premium Lite, and what you get in return.

YouTube Premium Lite: Costs and Features

If you’re prepared to add yet another digital subscription to your monthly outgoings, YouTube Premium Lite will set you back $8 a month. There’s no way to pay annually to get a discount overall, and there’s no family plan where you can spread the benefits to other people—two options you do have with the full version of YouTube Premium.

YouTube Premium Lite has one feature: It removes the ads on most YouTube videos, wherever you’re watching them (from your phone to your TV). You’ll still see ads on music videos, on YouTube Shorts, and when you search for videos on YouTube—but all ad types on other content will disappear.

Your subscription will be linked to your Google account, so it works wherever you’re signed in, and it includes YouTube Kids content as well. As it’s a monthly subscription, you can cancel at any time, and then subscribe again at any time. You can also upgrade at any time to the full YouTube Premium, of which we’ll learn more in a moment.

YouTube Premium Lite: Should You Subscribe?

The plan removes ads on most videos across all your devices.Courtesy of David Nield

A lot of us are now juggling multiple digital subscriptions for everything from cloud storage to AI chatbots, and it’s understandable if you’re not keen on the thought of adding extra expense on top, especially for an app and platform that you can already access free of charge.