Is Amazon Prime worth it for the annual investment fee, and does it live up to all the hype? It is one of the most popular services from amazon.com. And so there are a couple of different options here.
You can always start out with a 30-day trial. You can just experiment to see if it’s right for you or not without paying anything. So it’s kind of cool that Amazon lets you completely test-drive it and actually get the full experience to actually see if it’s right for you.
It’s typically a $119 per year membership fee. So 12 months, $119 per year. Pay that up-front, cancel anytime. I don’t think you get your money back. They actually just added another option, which is a monthly charge, and that is at $12.99 per month, which is kind of nice. Obviously it’ going to be a little bit more for the year, but maybe you just want to do it for a few months to either test it out or only have the benefits for a few months without paying for the entire annual amount.
But the question is, do the Amazon Prime benefits actually make it worth the fee to join the program?
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Free two-day shipping
So this is what most people know Amazon Prime for. You pay that fee, and you basically get unlimited two-day free shipping on the majority of items especially those that are actually fulfilled by Amazon.
And something to note here though is that again. Amazon actually does have free shipping on orders of $25 or even $35 dollars. But you’re not going to be getting the speed, and actually. You also have to spend a certain amount. What’s cool about Prime is that if you order just one thing for $7, you can get free 2-day shipping on it. So you can be using it a lot.
So the first thing to really judge is, how much stuff would you actually buy off Amazon, and how fast do you want that shipping to actually come when you place that order? And again, this service is actually available to non-Prime members, but you’re going to pay $8.99 for the two-day shipping plus 99 cents per item.
So you can see how quickly that would add up if you were just doing it, you know, one item at a time or one order at a time. And so if you’re going to order a ton of stuff, Amazon Prime makes sense just for the expedited shipping, if that’s something that would be of value to you.
One little-known power tip here that a lot of people don’t take advantage of is when you are signed up for Amazon Prime, but you don’t actually want your items really fast in the two-day period, you can actually opt-out of the faster shipping for a lot of different digital credits.
And so at times, you get a few free dollars for digital music or digital videos if you wanted to like rent or buy a brand-new release. You can get credits that go towards that. You can get credits that go towards Prime Panty, to e-books, and so, you don’t really get to select which is which, but whenever you reach that checkout page, if you want to opt-out of your expedited shipping, you can actually kind of recover some costs with those digital credits, which is kind of a cool tip for Prime users.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Prime Video
Now, this is pretty valuable. This is included with your Prime membership, and you get kind of like Netflix, a lot of movies, a lot of TV shows, a lot of documentaries, as well as access to additional channels that you can just add on to Prime video as well. You can add on Showtime, HBO, but Prime Video itself is pretty valuable.
You know, you may not use it, but it’s something you can definitely get value out of. It’s been cool to see that Prime is actually producing their own TV shows, kind of like Netflix has been doing, and there have been a few cool, different shows that have showed up there. And so again, this is just a perk that sort of stacks on top of your shipping benefits, but something to consider here is that if you’re already a Netflix user, it doesn’t really come that close to Netflix.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Prime Music
Now, this is, again, something that you may or may not use. It’s something that I found to be pretty cool and to really tap into the power of it, you can download a desktop app and also a mobile app.
And this gives you access to millions of songs and some new stuff, some old stuff, and what I’ve found this to be the coolest is with Amazon Echo, and you can just kind of say that you want to play a current hits channel or something, and you have all that music that’s ad-free.
You can download it to your device. And again, it doesn’t compare fully to something like Spotify, in which you get a lot more music, a lot more current music, but again, even that membership alone is $120 a year and about $10 a month. And so, Prime Music is kind of a cool benefit, and something that you might want to consider, though: will you use it or not.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Prime Photos
So, this is pretty crazy. You can actually store unlimited photos on the cloud. You can back up all the photos from your phone, from your computer, and just make sure that you don’t lose anything if you were to have some sort of hard drive crash or lose your phone or something like that.
Additionally, as a Prime member, you also get five gigabytes of storage for anything on Amazon Cloud. So you could store video files, or your own digital music, or anything else that you would want access to. Amazon’s just kind of stacking on these other things. Plus, you can actually receive some shipping discounts for Amazon Prints.
And so yeah, Amazon’s definitely taking over the world. If you want to print out your photos, or whether you want to print out like a canvas or something, Amazon’s got some cool services for that, and Prime members receive some expedited shipping benefits, complimentary with their membership.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Kindle Owner’s Lending Library and Kindle First
As a Prime member, you’re actually entitled to one free Kindle book per month, if, this is the key thing, you actually have an Amazon device to read it on. So you have to have a Kindle or a Fire tablet or an Amazon phone, but if you’ve got one of those, then you’re entitled to get that one free book a month.
A study was done to basically show if you’re a big reader and you’re taking advantage of this if the book was $9.99, the Kindle book per month, that value alone could be $120 of value in a year, just from all of the titles that you’re getting off the lending library.
And then Kindle First is something you get access to as a Prime member to have early access to some of the new release books, and you can get access to that, I believe, just from the Kindle app on any phone. So, if you’re a reader, there are some cool Amazon Prime benefits for you.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Prime Early Access
Amazon Prime Day, which Amazon talks about as their biggest shopping day of the year, is even bigger than Black Friday or Cyber Monday, where they put out a ton of discounts, a ton of deals, on a lot of different products so you can experience some big savings.
So if that’s something that you’re interested in throughout the year, what’s cool about being a Prime member is you get 30 minutes’ early access to deals ahead of other people. And I’m not even sure on Prime Day if you even can shop at all without a Prime membership.
There’s a lot of Prime users, so there’s still competition, but if you put notifications on your phone, you plan ahead, you know what deals that you want to shop for, and you really do the research, you can really recover the cost of your Prime membership just with the savings alone that you’ll get on days like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, you know, all throughout fourth quarter during the holidays and on Amazon Prime Day.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Prime Pantry
This is something we haven’t used very much, but it’s kind of something cool to have access to.
If you want to get some household items as well as groceries delivered to your house at a much better price than any other service, you still have to pay, I believe, $5.99 for a delivery charge and you can fill up a box of stuff, but it’s a pretty crazy deal compared to other deals out there. So it’s just a benefit that Prime members have that you may enjoy.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Amazon Family
Now, this is something that a lot of people haven’t heard about, and this is a way to get 20% off your diapers subscription on Amazon, and a few other benefits that come along with Amazon Family as well.
You can see that if that’s something that you’re going to use, that can add up pretty quickly to cover the membership fee, especially with how competitive Amazon’s prices already are and how low they already are. When you start stacking these additional discounts, it can add up to a lot of value really fast.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Twitch Prime
There are a few kinds of incentives that you get there, sometimes some discounts on new games.
Is Amazon Prime worth it – Membership Sharing
I believe that in the past, they said it was four adults that could share one Prime membership, but I think now it’s two adults and four kids. And whatever that means, it just means that multiple people in your household can take advantage of all of these benefits. Whether that’s watching Prime video on a couple of different devices at the same time, whether that’s whenever anybody orders, you know, benefiting from that two-day shipping.
When you think about that initial investment cost and the membership-sharing aspect, it’s pretty incredible.
