Update 2/16/22: There’s an interesting report in the comments of a Gift of Prime purchase tracking on Swagbucks and MyPoints as a Prime membership and earning rewards.
Update 2/15/22: The Amazon system is not allowing some people to pay for this with a gift card balance while others are (workaround). YMMV, I’ve been buying these up slowly (did 5 so far) and haven’t had any issues paying with a gift card balance.
Update 2/3/22: Amazon has now confirmed the price increase (Amazon link – affiliate link here and below in this post). The updated pricing will apply to Prime sign-ups beginning on February 18, 2022. For current Prime members, the new prices will apply after March 25, 2022, on the date of their next renewal. Updated the post below with some additional details.
Original Post 2/2/22:
Amazon Prime Price Increase
The price of Amazon Prime Membership will increase to $139/year beginning February 18, 2022. (Change occurs March 25, 2022 for existing Prime subscribers.)
- Annual Prime membership price increases from $119 to $139.
- The monthly Prime membership price will change from $12.99 to $14.99.
- Prime Student price is also increasing from $59/year to $69/year, or monthly from $6.49 to $7.49.
- The EBT price goes up from $5.99/month to $6.99/month.
There’s been speculation about a Prime rate increase coming soon in the media for the past month or two, but it was never confirmed by Amazon and no one had an exact number of how much it would be. I believe we’re the first one breaking this news in the entire media (as far as my google searching goes) which is surprising! Amazon may have not yet officially released the info, but they had to tell Student renewals the accurate price, per the image below, which is how we learned about this now. (thanks to reader Austin)
Suggestion
You can lock in the $119 price by purchasing a Gift of Prime membership. These cost $119 right now and they never expire – set your Prime membership not to auto-renew by cancelling the membership using the ‘Manage My Membership’ tab, and then when it expires you’ll apply the Gift of Prime to your account. (You won’t lose any of your full current membership year when cancelling membership mid-year. That will be clear on the final screen before cancellation – it takes a few screens until you get there so don’t panic.)
Direct Link to purchase Gift of Prime membership
A few notes:
- The Gift of Prime price will presumably increase from $119 to $139 on February 18, 2022.
- The beauty of buying Gift Of Prime memberships is that they come with an option to convert into an Amazon gift card balance (with taxes included in the gift card cash out). So if you ever decide you don’t want Prime or don’t want to float the memberships you can always cash out the Gift of Prime cost as a gift card to your Amazon balance (or to anyone’s Amazon balance – it’s not tied to any single Amazon account, it’s like a fresh new Amazon gift card).
- You can find the Amazon gift card cash out option at the bottom of the email where it says: “If you are already an Amazon Prime, Amazon Student, or Prime Fresh member or do not want to activate the Prime membership, you’ll be able to exchange your Prime gift for an Amazon.com Gift Card. Click here.”
- Also, Amazon allows the purchase of Gift of Prime with your Amazon balance. So if you already have a large Amazon gift card balance sitting there anyway, you’re not losing anything by purchasing the Gift of Prime memberships. Just be sure to save the emails or keep track of them so you don’t end up forgetting about it.
- One more note about Prime membership and Gift of Prime membership: Amazon charges sales tax on these. It goes based on your state of residence whether there is sales tax. If you have two residences, be sure to set your billing address for the purchase to the one which has lower sales tax.
- You can only buy one Gift of Prime membership at a time. In order to buy a second one, you’ll have to either change the delivery date or send it to a different email address.
- (If you have an Amazon 5% credit card, you’ll lose the 5% rate when you don’t have Prime. So if there’s a day or two between when your Prime expires and when you apply the Gift of Prime membership, you won’t have 5% on those days.)
- Readers in the comments mention that Gift of Prime membership purchases have worked in the past to trigger the Citigold $200/$400 subscription benefit.
- Another important note: grandfathered Prime accounts from many years ago have the option for multiple family members as add-ons (versus the new system where you only get one family member). The moment you cancel Prime, you lose the grandfathered family accounts and they can never be added back.
I plan on buying out many years of Gift of Prime. I’ll set myself an annual reminder before my Prime membership expiration date about the Gift of Prime cards sitting in my inbox, and I’ll also save the claim code elsewhere in case the email somehow gets lost. I never bothered with this in prior Prime price increases, and now I’m jealous of those who still have their $79 or $99 locked Gift of Prime purchases from not so many years ago. 🙂
