Is an Amazon Prime membership worth it?

In the past 6 years, Amazon Prime Day has slowly become a yearly event that can rival Black Friday both in the amount of discounted items as well as the size of the discounts.

But Prime Day is only available to Amazon Prime members. So, the question is, aside from that one yearly event — is it worth getting Amazon Prime at all?

Well, let’s take a look at how much it costs and what we get:

Amazon Prime membership price: $12.99 / month or $119 / year

Amazon Prime member benefits:

• Free, fast shipping
• Exclusive discounts — get early access to some discounts, or extra price-cuts on already discounted items
• Savings and free shipping on prescription deliveries
• Prime Video — access to films, TV shows, Amazon exclusives ($9 / mo value)
• Amazon Gaming — access to free or exclusive virtual items within popular games. One free Twitch subscription per month ($5 / mo value)
• Amazon Music — access to 2 million songs. Not to be confused with Music Unlimited, which has 60+ million (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music competitor)
• Prime Reading — Kindle magazines and a rotating list of Kindle books for free
• Unlimited photo storage — a good alternative to Google Photos, which is axing its free service

Become an Amazon Prime member here

So, just by looking at the provided benefits, Amazon Prime can absolutely be worth it to many users.

Video streaming

For example, if you are a Twitch regular and also looking for a nice Netflix alternative — you can support your favorite streamer ($5) and watch Prime Video ($9) every month. That’s a $14 / month value condensed into $13 per month, adding tons of extra perks for shopping on top.

Shopping

If you just happen to shop random stuff on Amazon every month, you can also benefit from Prime. A quick look at some $10-$20 trinkets reveals that you can easily average a $2 discount per item (that’s a conservative example). Add the free Prime shipping on top of that and the saved money start to pile up. That $13 per month pretty much pays for itself with a couple of Amazon orders.

Reading

If you are a devoted bookworm, you’ll get new books, comics, short stories, and magazines to check out on your Kindle entirely for free.

Photo cloud backup

Looking where to store your photos? Google Photos is ending its free service, which inevitably means that people will either pay for more storage on Google servers or look for an alternative. If you are already paying for Prime membership — that's a pretty good extra perk to have! Non-Prime members can sign up for 100 GB ($2 / month), 1 TB ($7 /month) or 2 TB ($12 / month) accounts on Amazon Photos. Prime members get unlimited storage for their photos and 5 GB of server space for their videos. Yeah, the latter is a bit of a downer.

Prime Music vs Prime Music Unlimited

The only thing that doesn’t really offer as much value is Prime Music — limited to 2 million tracks, you can be sure that your more eclectic taste will probably not be met. The good news is that Prime members can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited (the actual Spotify competitor) for $7.99 / mo., whereas it costs $9.99 / mo. for non-Prime users.

Prime Day