Getting Apple News+ Through Costco Canada — What Actually Works
I figured this out about a year ago when my partner mentioned we were overpaying for streaming subscriptions. I looked into it because I already had a Costco membership from Toronto and was curious if there was a real deal buried in there. It turned out there was, but the process isn't as obvious as you might think, and a couple of things will catch you off guard if you aren't expecting them. Costco Canada doesn't run Apple News+ directly as a standalone product at every warehouse. What they sell instead is an Apple Gift Card — usually the $25 or $50 denomination — at a slight discount from face value, and you use that card to fund an Apple One bundle or subscribe to Apple News+ through your Apple ID. The savings come from the discount on the card itself, not from a direct discount on the Apple News+ subscription price. That distinction matters because some people walk in expecting to hand over cash at checkout and leave with a news subscription. It doesn't work that way. The most common path I've seen people take successfully is buying a $50 Apple Gift Card in-warehouse for roughly $46 CAD, then redeeming it toward an Apple One Individual plan, which bundles Apple News+, Apple Music, Apple TV+, and 50GB of iCloud storage. If you only want Apple News+, you can still use the card balance on a monthly subscription, but the per-month value starts to erode depending on current pricing.
As of my last check, Apple News+ runs at about $14.99 CAD per month in Canada when purchased directly through Apple. The Apple One Individual plan is around $24.99 CAD monthly. So if you're already going to use Apple Music or Apple TV+, the bundle makes the math work in your favour. If you're only after the news component, the per-month cost per service drops below the direct price, but only marginally unless you're bundling. Here is the actual process I followed, step by step, so you don't have to figure it out blind: First, grab the Apple Gift Card from the electronics or gift card aisle near the front registers. Costco tends to place these in the same section as iTunes and App Store cards. Verify the card denomination — most locations carry $25 and $50. Some warehouses have carried $100 during promotional periods, but those are less consistent. Pay at checkout. You get a physical card with a scratched-off PIN and a claim code on the back.
Second, go to settings.apple.com or open the App Store on your iPhone or iPad. Redeem the code by tapping your profile icon, selecting "Redeem Gift Card or Code," and scanning or entering the code. Your account balance updates immediately. Third, navigate to the Apple One subscription page or the Apple News+ app. When you attempt to start the subscription, choose to pay with your Apple ID balance. If the balance covers the full amount, you're set. If not, you'll be prompted to add a secondary payment method for the remainder. That's normal and expected. There is one edge case that cost me about twenty minutes of frustration the first time around. I redeemed a $50 Apple Gift Card and tried to subscribe to Apple News+ individually, but the redemption didn't apply because the card was flagged as "already used" even though I hadn't touched it. I double-checked the code, confirmed it was entered correctly, and called Apple Support. It turned out the card had been pre-activated at the warehouse register, but sometimes the activation takes up to two hours to propagate through Apple's systems, especially on weekends. I waited, and the card worked on the second attempt. If you run into this, don't panic and don't buy another card. Give it three hours, preferably overnight, and try again.
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Another thing nobody mentions: Costco Canada occasionally runs limited-time promotions where the Apple Gift Card discount is deeper, like $40 for a $50 card. These drop without warning and sell out fast. If you're serious about this, check the Costco.ca website directly rather than relying on in-warehouse availability, because the online inventory sometimes reflects promotions that haven't been updated in the physical store yet. I found this out when my local Mississauga warehouse had out-of-stock signs on the Apple cards while Costco.ca showed six units available for same-day shipping to the warehouse for pickup. If you don't have a Costco membership, you can still buy Apple Gift Cards at Costco.ca as a non-member, but you'll need to pay a small online purchasing fee and you won't get the in-warehouse discount. The fee usually runs around $3 to $5, which eats most of the margin. In those cases, just buying the card directly from Apple or waiting for a direct promotional offer from Apple is often the cleaner path. A counter-intuitive detail about the Apple One bundle is that Apple News+ is the only service in the lineup that requires cellular connectivity on your device to stream the full magazine experience. The other services work fine on Wi-Fi alone, but Apple News+ pushes full-media content that some users report failing to load properly without a mobile data connection, even when Wi-Fi is available. This is a known behaviour tied to how Apple News+ serves its digital edition assets, not a bug on your end. If you're subscribing primarily through Costco's discount path, make sure you're comfortable with that quirk before committing.
Also worth noting: Costco Canada does not sell a dedicated Apple News+ promo code or a discounted direct subscription. Any site claiming to offer a coupon code for Apple News+ through Costco is probably pulling its information from outdated or US-specific pricing pages. The Costco route is strictly the gift card mechanism, and the only way to verify a live promotion is through Costco.ca's product listing or by calling your local warehouse directly. The whole process, once you know what you're doing, takes about fifteen minutes from purchase to active subscription. The only real friction points are the card activation delay and the confusion around whether Apple News+ is actually cheaper than the direct price. It is, if you use the card strategically. It isn't, if you buy a single $25 card and try to stretch it across multiple months — the effective discount drops to almost nothing at that scale.
