Amazon Prime, the popular service that allows you to order almost anything with free two-day shipping, is raising its prices.
The price per month for an Amazon Prime membership for new subscribers will increase from $10.99 to $12.99. If you have an Amazon Prime student account, expect to see an increase from $5.49 to $6.49 per month. The new Amazon Prime comes out to around $156 per year.
The Amazon Prime price changes go into effect January 19, 2018, for new subscribers. If you’re an existing customer and you plan to renew your monthly subscription, the new prices kick in after February 18, 2018, according to Amazon.
Amazon introduced the pay-per-month option less than two years ago to attract customers who didn’t want to pay $99 up front for an annual subscription.
If you’re someone who has been paying for the annual subscription at $99 ($49 for students), you will keep the same pricing. It appears that Amazon would prefer its subscribers to be locked in to the annual subscription instead of paying per month. By increasing the price of the monthly subscription, it may push people to subscribe for a year and increase the chances of customers using Amazon services more.
“Prime provides an unparalleled combination of shipping, shopping, and entertainment benefits, and we continue to invest in making Prime even more valuable for our members,” the company said in a statement to Recode. “The number of items eligible for unlimited free two-day shipping increased in recent years from 20 million to more than 100 million items. We have expanded Prime Free Same-Day and Prime Free One-Day delivery to more than 8,000 cities and towns. Members also enjoy a growing list of unique benefits like Prime Music, Prime Reading, exclusive products and much more.”
If you’re someone who has been paying per month, and you’ve been using Amazon Prime services consistently for more than a year, then you may want to consider upgrading to the annual plan to save a little cash. On the other hand, if you’re someone who isn’t really interested in all the services or deals available on Amazon Prime and you’re not really into a commitment, then the Amazon Prime price increase may not be much of an issue.
Amazon recently announced their list of 20 potential locations for a second headquarters. According to Amazon, the company will invest $5 billion dollars into construction of the new headquarters that has been dubbed HQ2. Amazon said the new headquarters will provide 50,000 jobs to the city it chooses.
