Personal Finance

Amazon Raises Monthly Prime Fee — Is it Worth it?

by Jonathan Dyer

The price of two-day shipping, video streaming, and more just went up for some. On the heels of revealing the top 20 finalists for their much-hyped second headquarters location, today Amazon announced that it was raising the price of its Prime subscription, but only for monthly users. As Yahoo Finance reports, the new monthly fee will climb to $12.99 from its current $10.99. This is effective immediately for new members and will hit current monthly users on their next renewal date after February 18th. Meanwhile the annual subscription option remains at $99.

Incidentally there are many interesting elements to Amazon Prime that many consumers might not realize. Beyond the main two-day shipping on many items (or faster in some areas) selling point, Prime members also have access to a massive library of streaming music, television, and movies. Additionally Prime users get early access to Amazon’s Lightning Deals as well as unlimited photo storage.

Because of these perks, if you do a fair bit of shopping on Amazon and use the media streaming libraries to replace other services like Netflix and Spotify, the $99 subscription could be a great deal. However the monthly payment option, which always exceeded the annual fee when added up for an entire year, will now cost upwards of 50% more on an annual basis. As a result, if you’re still on the monthly plan, it may be time to either upgrade or cancel.

Although Amazon does not release Prime membership figures, research firm Statista estimated as of last September there were 90 million subscribers in the United States. In other words, the company can afford a bit of churn from this latest price hike. As for consumers, they’ll still be able to try Prime services free for 30 days. After that, they may have a hard decision to make.

Also published on Medium.

Author

Jonathan Dyer

I'm a small town guy living in Los Angeles looking to make solid financial decisions. I write for a number of finance websites, including HuffingtonPost and Business2Community. I founded DyerNews.com in 2015 to focus on personal finance and the emerging FinTech markets.

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