With Amazon Prime having raised its price again for the 2nd time since its inception, it has people asking if Amazon Prime is worth it? Amazon is raising the price of Amazon Prime to $119.00/year plus applicable taxes. The cost had been $99.00/year plus applicable taxes. To answer the question: Is Amazon Prime worth it, we will examine a few things that we feel are important to look at when weighing such a question. How much a year do you order from Amazon? Do you order big ticket items or small little items? Do you stream a lot of movies/TV shows? Do you listen to a lot of music? Do you store a lot of photos in the Amazon cloud?
Ok, so let’s start with the first question: How much do you order per year from Amazon and do you order big ticket items? The biggest draw we feel is Amazon Prime has 2-day shipping on items that are bought and sold by Amazon.com. You can order anything from computers, networking equipment, TV’s, PC monitors, Laptops and have it at your place 2 days later. If you’re a big reader, you can easily order a lot of books from Amazon. While we do order a lot of high-end equipment from Amazon for both ourselves and our clients, that may not be the primary factor what draws you to Amazon Prime.
Prime Video is another major reason for having Amazon Prime. You can see a selection of movies and TV shows that range from just released movies on DVD/Blu-Ray, to older movies that may not be on other streaming services. Amazon also has its own unique shows and movies that it allows Prime members to stream to their devices at home or on their computers and tablets. Unlike a regular TV studio that releases a weekly TV show one week at a time. Amazon releases their shows an entire season at a time, so you can binge watch it all at once. The drawback is you have to wait a while for the next season to come out. Amazon does film and release their TV and movies in 4K so those who have a 4K TV and streaming device are able to enjoy 4K content as a way to show off to your friends. Movies and TV shows that aren’t produced by Amazon do come and go month to month, so there is always new content for you to watch on Prime video.
You do have unlimited storage for your photos with Amazon Prime. Without Amazon Prime it would be limited to 5 GB of space. The cloud is an often unused/under used service that Amazon offers it Prime members. It is nice to have this storage space because it allows you one place to store all your photos instead of trying to find them in various drives or storage disks that may not be well marked or may even go bad over time.
Amazon music is another major draw for Amazon Prime. If you don’t have Spotify or another music streaming service, Amazon music is an ad free music streaming available to you so long as you have a wifi connection. It is great to have at the gym when you’re working out, and don’t want to download a playlist to your phone. You can just load up the Amazon music app and listen to a pre-made playlists or search for artists and listen to them while on wifi. Amazon music also works on the Amazon site and you can listen to music while you shop. You can listen even if Amazon music was opened in another tab of your internet browser.
In conclusion, we feel Amazon Prime is worth the extra $20/yr or an extra $1.67/month. With all that Amazon offers, that increase seems well worth the quality provided by Amazon in music, movies and shopping convenience. We do spend quite a bit of money on Amazon every year, but considering that we get your items in 2 days and have the added extras of streaming music and movies/ TV shows it’s a bonus to having Amazon Prime.
