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The story
Membership in “LYP Premium,” the paid plan for Yahoo’s messaging app LINE, reportedly reached 10.9 million as of the end of September 2026 — double the figure from the same month a year earlier. The scale makes it one of the largest subscription services in Japan, with expanded features like message unsend credited for driving the growth. On the forum, comments crossed between a sense that resistance to subscriptions in general is fading, and unease over LINE’s “infrastructure”-like status now that there’s no real alternative. The thread also touched on the concrete perks of the paid plan and the past controversy over where LINE’s data centers were located.
It has emerged that membership in the paid plan for Yahoo’s messaging app LINE has topped 10 million. Expanded features such as message unsend have broadened its appeal, doubling membership in a year. It’s believed to be the largest subscription (flat-rate) service in Japan, and the company is looking to grow it into a new revenue source.
Membership in the paid “LYP Premium” plan stood at 10.9 million as of the end of September, double the figure from the end of September 2025.
Group brands including SoftBank and Y!mobile…
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
Newspapers have been a bigger subscription than this since forever.
You okay? Losing it?
Re: #3
Watch enough commercials and the resistance just melts away. Thanks for keeping the economy running, I guess.
Back in the day even a ¥315/month ringtone site felt like a stretch, but there's not nearly as much resistance now.
That said, I do resent it when a handy feature gets paywalled after the fact, like LINE did.
LINE's data centers are in South Korea — every Japanese user's data is constantly getting hacked.
It was moved to Japan this past June. It's now under the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, governed by the Telecommunications Business Act, so it's gotten somewhat better.
Up until now it was basically a sieve.
It's basically social infrastructure at this point.
How did it come to this…
In Japan the only way to pull that off is with the bureaucracy's blessing. That goes for every business.
There is an alternative — WhatsApp has an overwhelmingly bigger share (worldwide).
Your security awareness is way too low.
Using the LINE app means agreeing to its terms, which amount to "we'll share your contact list." If even one acquaintance who has your number saved is using LINE, then LINE already holds whatever info about you is in that person's contacts — basically your identity. If there are multiple such people, it can even cross-reference the connections between them and map out your whole social network. You know the bureaucrats want this data, right? Once that's the trade-off on the table, of course they'll keep pushing everyone to use it. But did you actually consent to that? Makes you wonder if the bureaucrats are breaking their own privacy protection laws.
No way, seriously? What's even worth paying for?
But thanks to AI, the crackdown on explicit content got even stricter. Search for an NSFW word now and you won't get any hits.
Something's off here lol
Did they screw something up?
I think it's that you can carry over your entire chat history when you switch phones (free accounts are pretty limited now — I recall it used to carry everything over for free back in the day). That's probably the biggest perk. I only signed up for Premium when switching my wife's phone (it happened to be free at the time) to migrate her chats. Canceled Premium right after, so I'm not actually paying anything for it.
These days even calls within the family go through LINE in Japan. It's not so much that it won't go away as that it's become standard equipment at this point. Though honestly all I need are chat and free calls.
There are just a lot of idiots in Japan.
They heavily capped how much chat history free users can carry over when switching phones — I think that's the main reason. Probably a lot of people just leave it at that after switching, too.
That's both insulting to Taiwanese people and way too full of yourself.
Sounds like someone with pretty thin ties to real-world society.
Wasn't that already a problem a long time ago?
I only have the app installed because I'm forced to for work contacts and stuff.
I already wrote this further up, read the thread. The biggest issue is migrating your past chat history when you switch phones — free users can only carry over 15 days' worth, while paid Premium members can migrate everything. You're fine canceling Premium right after the migration, too.
Huh. Used to be free, and now more and more things require paying up.
Seriously? That's a nasty tactic.
If you don't need it to keep in touch with family and such, you don't have to install it. I don't really want to have it either, but I'm stuck with it.
That's the plan for businesses. For individuals it's just a few hundred yen a month.
The Yahoo Auctions-exclusive coupons are surprisingly not something to sneeze at.
Just from those alone I save something like ¥500–1000 every month.
Background and Key Points of Debate
LYP Premium is a service that combined the old Yahoo Premium with LINE’s paid perks, and as commenters in the thread pointed out, the membership figure also includes users who signed up for Yahoo Shopping or Yahoo Auctions benefits — so it’s easy to misread the 10.9 million figure as being entirely driven by demand for LINE’s paid features. The concrete perk that came up as the paid plan’s real value was chat-history migration when switching phones: free members are limited to the most recent 15 days, while paid members can transfer their entire history. Opinions split over how to view the shift toward subscriptions itself, with some treating it as no different from long-standing flat-rate services like newspapers or phone lines, and others resenting features being paywalled after the fact. Concerns were also raised about LINE’s past practice of managing data on servers in South Korea, though the article notes that operations were moved to Japan in June 2026 and are now under the supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “LINE’s paid membership tops 10 million, doubling in a year — LINE becomes one of Japan’s biggest subscriptions.”
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