Streaming Devices at Every Budget in 2026: Four Price Rises, and One Box to Wait Out

Apple, Roku, Amazon and Google all raised streaming-device prices between 26 June and 31 August 2026. Here is what each costs now, and the one we would not buy this month.

Nothing in this category costs what it did in May. Apple moved the Apple TV 4K to 199 and 249 dollars on 26 June. Roku raised its entire player line in late July, taking the Streaming Stick 4K from 49.99 to 79.99 dollars. Amazon put the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from 59.99 to 84.99 around 21 August without announcing it at all. Google took the Google TV Streamer from 100 to 150 dollars on 31 August. All four pointed at memory and component costs. Any budget guide written before June is now a list of wrong numbers.

What each device costs after the 2026 increases

• Roku Streaming Stick 4K: 49.99 to 79.99 dollars, late July 2026
• Roku Streaming Stick Plus: 39.99 to 59.99 dollars, and no Dolby Vision
• Fire TV Stick 4K Max: 59.99 to 84.99 dollars, reported 21 August 2026
• Apple TV 4K: 199 dollars for 64 GB, 249 dollars with Ethernet, from 26 June 2026
• Google TV Streamer: 100 to 150 dollars on 31 August 2026

Four companies raised prices between June and 31 August

The increases came in sequence and for the same stated reason. Apple went first on 26 June, adding 70 dollars to the 64 GB Apple TV 4K and 100 dollars to the 128 GB model with Ethernet – 54 and 67 percent respectively, the steepest percentage rise of any product in that round, according to FlatpanelsHD. Apple’s explanation was that the rapid expansion of AI data centres has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage, after a period of absorbing the cost.

Roku followed in late July across the whole player line. Amazon moved in August without a public announcement, which Pocket-lint reported on 21 August; Amazon’s statement afterwards said the consumer electronics industry is facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs and that it had absorbed them for as long as it could. Google was last, on 31 August, saying it was adjusting US pricing of selected Nest cameras, doorbells and the Google TV Streamer 4K because of rising component costs.

FlatpanelsHD’s tally of the year puts Apple TV up to 67 percent higher, Roku up to 60, Amazon up to 43, Google 50, and Walmart’s Onn devices up to 102. A Roku executive, speaking on background, tied the company’s increase to shortages in computer memory and other components caused by the artificial intelligence rush.

• Roku Streaming Stick: 29.99 to 39.99 dollars
• Roku Streaming Stick Plus: 39.99 to 59.99 dollars
• Roku Streaming Stick 4K: 49.99 to 79.99 dollars, the largest percentage jump in Roku’s line
• Roku Ultra and Roku Streambar SE: 99.99 to 149.99 dollars each
• Fire TV Stick HD 39.99, 4K Select 49.99, 4K Plus 69.99, 4K Max 84.99, Fire TV Cube 199.99 dollars

Under a hundred dollars, only two sticks still do Dolby Vision

The Roku Streaming Stick 4K was not discontinued when Roku overhauled its lineup in May 2025, and understanding why matters more than its age. It survives as the only Roku stick under 100 dollars that supports Dolby Vision. The newer Streaming Stick Plus that sits below it at 59.99 handles HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG, but not Dolby Vision – so on this one axis the cheaper, more recent product is the downgrade rather than the upgrade.

The other sub-100-dollar option with Dolby Vision is Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max at 84.99, which also brings Wi-Fi 6E, 2 GB of memory and 16 GB of storage. That is the whole shortlist. Anyone whose television handles Dolby Vision and who wants to feed it from a stick is choosing between a 79.99-dollar Roku and an 84.99-dollar Amazon device, and the 20-dollar saving on the newer Roku costs the format entirely.

One caution on the Fire stick: some listings market it as a 2026 or AI-powered model. It is the second-generation hardware announced in September 2023 with a software search feature added. Do not pay a new-model premium for it.

Buying a Fire stick now means choosing an operating system

Amazon has split its own lineup in two. Vega OS, a Linux-based platform replacing the company’s Android fork, arrived with the Fire TV Stick 4K Select in October 2025, and Amazon’s developer documentation confirms that all future Fire TV sticks will run it. Sideloading is gone on Vega unless you register as a developer, which ends Kodi and every similar workaround. The 4K Plus, the 4K Max and the Fire TV Cube remain on Android-based Fire OS.

Jared Newman’s assessment for PCWorld on 30 April 2026 is the most detailed account of what that costs a buyer, and its headline is that the new Fire TV operating system is for Amazon rather than for you. Because Vega is not Android, every service has to write a new application; smaller ones have none, and Amazon substitutes cloud-hosted versions for services including The Roku Channel, MLB and Crunchyroll, which consume around 8 Mbps merely to navigate menus and add latency on top. Tablo and HDHomeRun vanished, as did all local games. Six months after launch, automatic storage management, live TV category filters, dialogue boost, Alexa speaker integration and Matter Casting had still not returned. The 4K Select ships with half the memory of the device it replaced, which shows when switching applications.

The practical upshot is unusual: the 4K Max at 84.99 dollars is the last Android-based Fire stick, which is an argument for buying it now rather than waiting. Amazon has not said when a Vega replacement for it arrives, and we could not confirm that one had shipped as of today.

Every cheap box sells your home screen

Both of the affordable platforms now monetise the interface you look at before you have chosen anything. In March 2025 Roku tested an auto-playing, manually dismissable full-screen video advertisement that ran before users could reach the home screen. PCWorld’s Jared Newman wrote that Roku had crossed a line by putting an ad wall in front of its home screen, calling it a disappointing sign of what is to come and a failure of imagination. Pocket-lint’s verdict on the redesigned interface was blunter still: it is not just you, the new Roku home screen is an ad-infested mess.

Amazon’s version arrived on 28 May 2026, when it pushed a mandatory full-screen advertisement for its redesigned Fire TV mobile application to Fire TV devices, appearing at boot and requiring manual dismissal before anything could be streamed. There has since been a partial retreat, with home-screen video moved into a smaller mini-player and auto-play disabled on newer sets.

The point that belongs in a buying guide is the timing. None of this was on these devices when people bought them. It arrived by software update, on hardware already paid for, which means the advertising load on a stick bought in 2022 is materially worse today than it was on the day it was unboxed. Price that in, because you cannot opt out of it later.

Our picks at forty, sixty and eighty-five dollars, and the one to wait on

Every recommendation below carries today’s date, because these numbers have moved four times since June and retailers are still clearing pre-increase stock at the old ones. Check the price, and check when it was set.

Start with the exception, because it is the only entry here we would tell a reader not to buy at all. MacRumors’ buyer’s guide currently lists the Apple TV under Don’t Buy, with updates coming, and expects the June price will not come back down when a new model arrives. The box on sale today is the third generation announced on 18 October 2022, running an A15 chip. Pocket-lint calculated in June 2026 that it was on course to become the longest-selling Apple TV ever to go without a successor, passing 1,338 days on 4 July 2026. Paying 199 dollars for four-year-old silicon, weeks after a 70-dollar increase and reportedly weeks before a replacement, is the one purchase in this guide with a calendar argument against it.

• 39.99 dollars, Roku Streaming Stick: 1080p only, which is right for a bedroom set that is not 4K and wrong for anything else.
• 59.99 dollars, Roku Streaming Stick Plus: 4K without Dolby Vision. Fine on a television that does not support the format anyway.
• 79.99 dollars, Roku Streaming Stick 4K: the Dolby Vision option within Roku, and the biggest percentage price rise in the line.
• 84.99 dollars, Fire TV Stick 4K Max: Dolby Vision, Wi-Fi 6E and the last Fire stick on Android. Street prices diverge sharply from list here, so the figure to trust is the one on the page in front of you.
• 199 dollars, Apple TV 4K: wait, for the reasons set out above.

Sources: ecoustics · Pocket-lint · FlatpanelsHD · MacRumors · PCWorld