🤔 I wasn’t sure whether a Walmart+ subscription was actually worth paying for, so I decided to run the numbers. Instead of guessing, I pulled my real purchase history, estimated the actual value of the benefits, and compared it to the cost. What I found surprised me: even after discounting the benefits conservatively, the numbers still came out clearly in favor of the subscription.

TL;DR

Here’s how I decided to go with the Walmart+ subscription:

  • I started using Walmart as my main supplier for groceries and household items because of consistently good prices and free pickup
  • I got the Walmart OnePay card for 3% cash back and set it as my default payment method
  • I wasn’t sure Walmart+ was worth it, so I pulled my purchase history over ~84 days
  • I calculated my total spend (\$625.49) and annualized it to about \$2,718 per year
  • I estimated the extra 2% cash back from Walmart+ at about \$54 per year, which didn’t cover the \$98 cost
  • I looked at the additional benefits (streaming, Burger King discounts, free Whoppers)
  • I calculated their full value, then adjusted their value down conservatively to match how much I value the benefit
  • After those adjustments, the total value came out to about \$148 per year
  • Since that still exceeded the \$98 cost, I decided Walmart+ was worth it for me

Background

Walmart offers a Walmart+ subscription that’s similar to Amazon Prime. It includes free shipping, free delivery, and several additional perks.

One of those perks is a partnership with Burger King, which gives you 25% off digital orders, a free Whopper with purchase every three months, and 40% off a monthly Walmart+ subscription for your first year.

Walmart+ also includes a streaming benefit—you can choose between Paramount+ Essential or Peacock (both with ads), and switch between them every 90 days.

Burger King Bonus

There’s also a lesser-known way to get a better deal on Walmart+—at least for the first year—through a partnership with Burger King.

If you sign up for Walmart+ through this route, you can get 40% off the monthly subscription for your first year. That means instead of paying for the full year up front, you can go month-to-month at a discounted rate and cancel anytime.

Here’s how to find it:

  1. Go to BurgerKing.com (or BK.com)
  2. Sign up for the Royal Perks program (it’s free)
  3. Log in
  4. Click the menu icon in the upper-left corner (the three horizontal lines)
  5. Select “Partnerships”
  6. Find the Walmart+ offer

If you go this route, you’ll need to choose the monthly Walmart+ plan. Normally, that would be more expensive than the annual plan—but with the 40% discount, it comes out to about \$7.77 per month, or \$93.24 per year.

That’s actually cheaper than the standard \$98 annual plan.

The catch is that the 40% discount only lasts for the first year. After that, you’ll want to switch to the annual plan to avoid paying the full monthly rate.

So the clean way to handle this is:

  • Sign up through Burger King
  • Use the discounted monthly plan for the first year
  • Set a reminder to switch to the annual plan before the discount expires

This approach has a couple of nice advantages:

  • Slightly cheaper overall (by a few dollars)
  • Lower upfront commitment (monthly instead of annual)
  • Easy to cancel if you decide it’s not worth it

The savings themselves aren’t huge, but the flexibility is. And for me, that flexibility alone is worth the small amount of extra setup. And because you’re not paying all at once, this discounted monthly rate is actually even cheaper in terms of net present value—a concept that’s very useful in economics and one that I've tried to explain in a more intuitive way in this blog.

My Story

I started using Walmart as my primary supplier for groceries and household items because their prices are consistently good. Once I realized I could get free pickup on orders over \$35, that was a real game changer. It meant I didn’t have to spend time walking through the store, hunting things down, or exposing myself to all the other temptations sitting on the shelves.

At some point, I noticed that Walmart offered a credit card—the OnePay card—that gives 3% cash back on Walmart purchases, or 5% if you have a Walmart+ subscription. Since the card has no annual fee and 3% is better than the 2% I was getting from my Wells Fargo Active Cash card, I went ahead and got the card and set it as the only payment method on Walmart.com.

But I wasn’t convinced about Walmart+.

The main benefit is an extra 2% cash back, so I decided to run the numbers. I went through my purchase history over the past 84 days and found that I had spent \$625.49. That works out to about \$2,718 per year. At 2%, that’s roughly \$54 in additional cash back—still well short of the \$98 annual cost of Walmart+.

At that point, it didn’t look worth it.

Then I started digging into the other benefits.

Walmart+ includes access to a streaming service—you can choose between Paramount+ Essential or Peacock Premium (both with ads), and you can switch between them every 90 days. I was more interested in Paramount+, which normally costs about \$89.99 per year, so I included that as part of the value.

There’s also a partnership with Burger King. With Walmart+, you get 25% off one digital order per day, plus a free Whopper every three months (with purchase). I looked up a typical meal I might order—a Double Whopper combo—which came out to \$13.39. If I bought that once a month, the 25% discount would save about \$40.17 per year. The four free Whoppers add another \$28.76.

If you add everything up at face value, the benefits come out to about \$213 per year, which is more than double the \$98 subscription cost.

But that didn’t feel quite right.

I’m not actually paying for Paramount+ right now, so it’s clearly not worth the full \$90 to me. And I’m not convinced I would eat at Burger King every month just because I have a discount. So I adjusted both of those downward by 50%.

That brought the Burger King benefit down to about \$20 and the streaming value down to about \$45. The free Whoppers I kept at full value.

After those adjustments, the total came out to about \$148—still comfortably above the \$98 cost of Walmart+.

At that point, it started to look like a genuinely good deal, even under more conservative assumptions.