Amazon Raising Prime Service to $99/year

It was inevitable. I received the following email today from Amazon informing me that the price of their Amazon Primewill go up from $79 to $99 per year.

Dear Russell Turley,

We are writing to provide you advance notice that the price of your Prime membership will be increasing. The annual rate will be $99 when your membership renews on August 28, 2014.

Even as fuel and transportation costs have increased, the price of Prime has remained the same for nine years. Since 2005, the number of items eligible for unlimited free Two-Day Shipping has grown from one million to over 20 million. We also added unlimited access to over 40,000 movies and TV episodes with Prime Instant Video and a selection of over 500,000 books to borrow from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

For more information about your Prime membership, visit our Prime membership page.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Prime Team

In a previous post I hinted that I may not renew the service based on the classification of items as Add-Ons.  That has not been as big a problem as I envisioned then.  I now buy enough through Amazon that when I want to purchase an item designated as an Add-on, I have more in my cart that meets the requirement.  It does still bug though.  It is nice that a full five months before my service renews that I’m getting notice. Though, I would probably forget about the increase in price by then and rail about not being notified. This post should stop that.

Their reasons for increasing the cost, their increasing costs to provide the service, is reasonable.

With the increase, Amazon Prime is now $8.25 per month. If you are only using Amazon Primefor the movie and TV service, then you are now paying more than you would be for Netflix.  For breadth of shows Amazon still pales in comparison to Netflix, except in one area, new TV shows and movies.  Shows that are currently running on cable channels, like one of my favorite cancelled shows Psych, are available to purchase the day after they air on their channel.  It’s a nice feature that Netflix doesn’t offer.  If you don’t want to wait for the latest season to be available on Prime or Netflix for no additional cost, you have that option.

Streaming video aside, we subscribe and get batteries, toilet paper, etc. delivered regularly, and I am always reading some borrowed Kindle book on the Kindle or other tablet.  I’d say that I’m getting my $8.25 worth and then some every month so the increase is not causing me to jump ship.

Are you going to dump Amazon Prime because of the price increase?