Can You Talk Your Comcast Bill Down?
Here’s how to cut your bill without having to cut the cord.
Can making a call still help lower your Comcast bill? / Photograph courtesy of Comcast
Once upon a time, when you felt your TV bill ballooning out of control, you’d call the cable company, threaten to quit, wrangle yourself a new deal, and repeat as needed. Now, in the age of cord-cutting, it seems as if the best discounts are to be found in à la carte deal-digging: Drop this service, pick up that one, add another, end of story. The days of playing hardball with Comcast are over.
Or are they? Streaming services can add up; they too can raise prices over time. So I wondered: Is a call to our hometown behemoth still worth trying before going rogue? After all, I like Comcast. Could years of loyalty be a bargaining chip? Can I cut our bill — which had crawled up to $312 a month (for a deluxe cable package, Internet, and security) — without having to cut the cord?
My husband called first. He’d done the math on just the cable: The YouTube TV app ($83 a month, with 4K technology) plus HBO ($17) and Peacock ($8) would get us everything we were getting with Xfinity and save us about $74 a month (so $888 a year). He told the agent on the line that he wanted to nix cable to save money. “Okay!” she said. And that was that. Done. Cord cut. In minutes. What? I said. Without any negotiation at all? “I don’t think they do that anymore?” he said.
Illustration by James Yates
Try two: I called — as a customer, mind you, not a reporter — quickly got another rep, and laid it all out for her. Oh, no, she assured me: She could help with that bill. We could get all the channels we watched, including HBO, and she could trim the total bill to $264 a month, via a promotion. That’s a savings of $48 a month ($576 a year). I hung up to mull: The YouTube option would still be $26 a month ($312 a year) cheaper. So I called again, got a third rep, and laid it out (again), and voilà! She offered upgraded Internet, plus the same security and cable package (and HBO), for a grand total of $247 a month, good for two years. Our YouTube option, after taxes, with no changes to Internet or security, would be about $240 a month.
In the end, cutting the cord to save $84 a year didn’t seem worth it. For now, anyway. So we stuck with Comcast. You might not. But you should call and haggle. It might just pay off.
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Published as “Can You Talk Your Comcast Bill Down?” in the October 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
