Amazon Prime Membership Price Will Soon Increase To $139 (Up From $119). The change will go into effect on February 18 for new Prime members and after March 25 for existing members.
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Amazon Prime is starting to get pricey, considering I am getting Hulu for only 99 cents a month.
The price of Amazon Prime Membership will increase from $119/year to $139/year. The change will occur sometime in the next month or so (possibly on March 1, 2022). Prime Student price is also increasing from $59/year to $69/year.
There’s been speculation about a Prime rate increase coming soon in the media for the past month or two, but it was never confirmed by Amazon and no one had an exact number of how much it would be. I believe we’re the first one breaking this news in the entire media (as far as my google searching goes) which is surprising! Amazon may have not yet officially released the info, but they had to tell Student renewals the accurate price, per the image below, which is how we learned about this now. (thanks to reader Austin)
Suggestion
You can lock in the $119 price by purchasing a Gift of Prime membership. These cost $119 right now and they never expire – set your Prime membership not to auto-renew by cancelling the membership using the ‘Manage My Membership’ tab, and then when it expires you’ll apply the Gift of Prime to your account. (You won’t lose your full current membership year when cancelling membership, as will be clear on the final screen; they even give the option on the final screen to ‘pause’ membership.)A few notes:
The beauty of buying Gift Of Prime memberships is that they come with an option to convert into an Amazon gift card balance (with taxes included). So if you ever decide you don’t want Prime or don’t want to float the memberships you can always cash out the Gift of Prime cost as a gift card to your Amazon balance (or to anyone’s Amazon balance – it’s not tied to any single Amazon account, it’s like a fresh new Amazon gift card).
Also, Amazon allows the purchase of Gift of Prime with your Amazon balance. So if you already have a large Amazon gift card balance sitting there anyway, you’re not losing anything by purchasing the Gift of Prime memberships. Just be sure to save the emails or keep track of them so you don’t end up forgetting about it.
One more note about Prime membership and Gift of Prime membership: Amazon charges sales tax on these. It goes based on your state of residence whether there is sales tax. So if you have two residences, be sure to set your default Amazon address to the one which doesn’t have sales tax and then you can buy these with no sales tax.
Readers in the comments mention that Gift of Prime membership purchases have worked in the past to trigger the Citigold $200/$400 subscription benefit.
Another important note: grandfathered Prime accounts from many years ago have the option for multiple family members as add-ons (versus the new system where you only get one family member). The moment you cancel Prime, you lose the grandfathered family accounts and they can never be added back.I plan on buying out many years of Gift of Prime. I’ll set myself an annual reminder before my Prime membership expiration date about the Gift of Prime cards sitting in my inbox, and I’ll also save the claim code elsewhere in case the email somehow gets lost. I never bothered with this in prior Prime price increases, and now I’m jealous of those who still have their $79 or $99 locked Gift of Prime purchases from not so many years ago. 🙂
Thanks and credit to DoC for the information.
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They should make the Prime Video subscription completely optional and split it out. We all know that increase is from that Lord of the Rings prequel TV series (estimated budget from $500 million to $750 million per season) and NFL Thursday Night game rights ($1 billion annually.)
It’s now almost two and a half times what a Costco membership is. The Amazon Prime is too damn high.
Admittedly, I’ve never been an Amazon Prime subscriber - if I see something that is below $25 and at an unbeatable sale price, I’ll just add a third-party physical gift card to my order.
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Amazon is raising the price of its annual Prime subscriptions from $119 to $139 per year in the United States, the company announced along with its earnings report Thursday. The price of a monthly subscription will also increase from $12.99 to $14.99.
The company said it is increasing the price because of “expanded Prime membership benefits,” such as added Prime Video content and expanded free same-day shipping, as well to compensate for the rising costs of labor and transportation in its distribution network. The move comes as prices for just about everything — from food to energy — have gone up in recent months. Amazon (AMZN)'s global workforce has doubled over the past two years, to 1.6 million employees, and the company also said last year that it had increased wages for thousands of workers.
The company last raised prices for Prime in 2018, when it bumped the annual membership up from $99. The latest price hike represents a 17% increase.The change will go into effect on February 18 for new Prime members and after March 25 for existing members.
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Since the link to buy Amazon Prime as I gift is not easily searchable on Amazon here it is:
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I thought I asked this here but don’t see it. If my Prime renewal is march 7th, can I beat the increase for existing members (March 25) and still pay the $119 for one more year? I don’t want auto renewal to kick in with the higher price and have to fight them for a refund.
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For those who get EBT (SNAP/WIC) or Medicaid you can also get a discount off your Amazon Prime monthly membership (I believe it is 50% off the regular monthly pricing). I believe Amazon limits that discount to 4 years though.
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@rick505 said in Amazon Prime Membership Price Will Soon Increase To $139 (Up From $119). The change will go into effect on February 18 for new Prime members and after March 25 for existing members.:
I thought I asked this here but don’t see it. If my Prime renewal is march 7th, can I beat the increase for existing members (March 25) and still pay the $119 for one more year? I don’t want auto renewal to kick in with the higher price and have to fight them for a refund.
If your renewal is March 7th and the cutoff for existing accounts is March 25, I think you want to do automatic renewal this year, and not turn off auto-renewal until after you are charged. I believe it says in your Prime account information ahead of time how much it will charge you. It may not say the amount until closer to your renewal. My renewal isn’t until July and it still says $119, but I assume that will update later. I recall seeing specific information about how much and when it would charge close to my renewal date.
Before the price change you can buy a Gift of Prime for $119 and send it to yourself. Then next year before your renewal date you would turn off auto-renew, let your membership expire, and then use your Gift of Prime to restart your Prime.I’ve never done this myself as I’m grandfathered with 4 family members’ accounts attached to mine, so until the point that they cancel this status I’m not touching anything on my account and will keep autorenewing. But I do have a Gift of Prime saved from a previous price hike to use at a later time. The good thing is that if you ever decide you’re not going to use it, you can turn it into a regular gift card.
Hope this helps.
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Just to follow-up, as mentioned, my Prime did renew today at the “previous” rate of $119 so I did get in under the wire. I checked a couple days ago and saw it indicated the auto renewal at the mentioned rate and not the increased price. So one more year of prime for me but I’m really thinking hard about the benefit/cost and am thinking real hard about cancelling after this year.
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Does anyone know if you don’t have Prime and instead spend $35+ in order to get free shipping, how fast is the shipping speed? Does it take just a few days or more like a week to get your stuff?
I like Prime Video, but there are cheaper alternatives. You can get ad-supported Hulu for 99 cents a month from Black Friday promos and there are other good streaming services that are free such as Tubi and Pluto.
I guess it mostly depends on how often you make Amazon purchases to see if is worth it for you.
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