Nintendo charges you to play games online. The base subscription is cheaper than Sony and Microsoft plans, but the Expansion Pass raises that price considerably. Nintendo sells one-month, three-month, and 12-month subscriptions, and the price per month goes down when you buy more months at once (a 12-month subscription costs less than half of what it costs to buy 12 months individually). Nintendo also offers a family plan, which for $35 a year gives up to eight accounts most of the benefits of an individual Switch Online subscription. Obviously, the deal becomes better as you add more accounts, but it’s still more cost-effective than an individual subscription even if you have only two people in your family. However, a “better” deal doesn’t make Nintendo Switch Online a good one, and that value proposition has gotten more complicated with the introduction of the Online Expansion Pass.

The Nintendo Online Expansion Pass offers two kinds of benefits to subscribers, currently. The first is free additional content for Nintendo’s own online-enabled titles, including an expansion for Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Splatoon 2, and a host of track additions to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The Online Expansion Pass also adds select Sega Genesis, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 64 games to its library of previous generation software alongside the existing NES, SNES, and Game Boy titles provided with the basic online service.

With the upcoming Switch 2, the Online Expansion Pass will offer an additional benefit: access to paid game enhancements. Nintendo is going to sell Switch 2 game enhancements to games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Party Jamboree, but the company is also offering at least some of these at no additional fee to Online Expansion Pass subscribers. We’ll update this with more information as it becomes available.

You can buy all of these plans directly from Nintendo, but you can also buy codes for three-month, 12-month, and family plan subscriptions to give as gifts. These codes sometimes go on sale, saving you a few extra dollars—if you see a good deal on one and plan to stay subscribed indefinitely, you can buy these subscriptions and add them to your existing account, extending the time remaining on your membership by up to three years. A seven-day free trial is also available.

Remember that these accounts don’t cover each individual Switch you own but individual user accounts. If you have multiple active user accounts on your Switch, each user account needs its own Switch Online subscription to play online and access Switch Online–exclusive downloadable content. A family plan is the best way to cover this scenario.

Members of a family plan generally have access to the same stuff as individual members, including online play and the same downloadable games and other content. But occasionally you’ll come across some exceptions: For example, Nintendo will sell you only four of its replica Super Nintendo controllers per Switch Online subscription, regardless of whether you have an individual or family subscription. There aren’t really any other downsides, though.

For now, we would advise sticking with the base Nintendo Switch Online plan and skipping the Online Expansion unless you want the expansion content for Animal Crossing or Mario Kart—at least until Nintendo can make a more compelling case for the service.