“We really wanted to exhaust all the possible ways of bringing on new subscribers — only got to a price increase pretty deep into my time there, after six or seven years of really focusing on paid subscribers and scaling that up as much as possible.”

Exhaust Subscriber Growth First, Then Raise Prices — Crunchyroll's Sequencing Lesson

Crunchyroll spent six-plus years maximizing subscriber volume — through marketing, partnerships, content expansion, and adjacent product lines — before finally raising prices. The lesson isn't that you should always wait that long, but that growing the subscriber base to its potential ceiling is a prerequisite for getting the most from a price increase. Raising prices too early trades long-term growth velocity for short-term revenue.