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. 🙂
I purchased myself a gift membership last February for $119. My prime membership ends in January. In order to use the gift, do I have to officially cancel, or can I use the pause membership option?
What’s the best timing for canceling my current Prime membership, then re-upping with the Gift-of-Prime that I bought myself? Do I cancel the current membership, then re-join with the new GC before my old expiration date? Or do I need to wit until after my current term is over? Any risks of losing benefits or GC balances either way?
Hey. If anyone can help!
I’m trying to buy multiple ones. More than five. And Amazon cancelled all my orders!
Spoke to manager and they say they can’t do anything about it. I keep trying to reorder them and it locked my account. Currently have four processing. Any advice?
I bought mine slowly one at a time, buying quickly could trigger an anti-fraud algorithm. However, one of mine I purchased sat in processing for hours and so I cancelled it. I placed the order again and within 5 minutes it went through.
However, it seems like you’ve already triggered protections and you might already be under account restrictions. EDIT: Also just checked and gift of prime is now $139. Game over.
Can someone help with the questions I have for any non-prime member
1. Can I buy gift of Prime with my non-Prime account in case I want to sign up and if I dont sign up Prime can I convert it back to Amazon GC Balance?
2. And if you have prime already you can still buy gift of prime for yourself on the same Amazon account in which you have Prime?
Or does it need to be some other account?
If we can go through Swagbucks/Mypoints multiple times, and can get $15/$16 back each time, would it make sense to buy more Gift of Prime credits than we need and later convert them to Amazon credit?
Using a 5%-back Amazon card, this would be an effective 17.6% discount at Amazon (5% of $119 back from the credit card, $15 back from the points site).
I’m not very familiar with Swagbucks; am I missing something here?
I’m guessing there’s a cap of 1 redemption (per year?) for swagbucks/mypoints and/or the points for the transactions ultimately won’t post. But could be very interesting indeed if both those assumptions are not true.
Something I didn’t see mentioned here is that you can go through Swagbucks/Mypoints/etc to get to Amazon using the shopping tab and earn bonuses. If you do that and buy the gift of Prime, you will get 1500 SB (pends for 30 days) or 2500 Mypoints (around $16). The sites do mention you earn the credits for purchasing a Prime subscription, but many don’t seem to know it also applies to gift of Prime. I confirmed this for Swagbucks and I need another day to confirm it for Mypoints.
That brings Prime down to $104. I don’t use it much where I live, but my mother uses it constantly in Hawaii and it is incredibly popular there since free shipping to Hawaii is almost non-existent in online shopping.
If you purchased 3 years of Prime without doing this then you left about $45 on the table. 🙁
ALSO, another savings tip. Add a prepaid card to your Amazon account and set it as the default card. Set the billing address to somewhere in New Hampshire. Make sure you have at least $119 in your gift card balance and the buy the gift of prime while going through a portal as I say above. If you have more than $119 in gift balance the card won’t be accessed, authorized, or otherwise used.
Congrats, you bought the gift of prime while paying New Hampshire sales tax (0%). That saves about $10 in my state.
I doubt GoP will track as a Prime membership on the portals, but would be sweet if it does! Let us know
Hi Chuck! I already know it does on Swagbucks as I did it on Feb 8th and it showed as pending on Feb 10th. I found it only by chance as I had went through the portal to go to Amazon and later had to figure out why I was getting 1500 SB. On the SB portal to Amazon it said 1500 SB for a “new” prime subscription.
Update, I just checked Mypoints and it tracked there too. I’m unsure if you can have multiple subscriptions track on the same portal, which is why I did MP on the second one.
Proof : https://imgur.com/a/Bf2Drbl
Very interesting, I’ll add a note
Hey, just as an FYI, this also worked with TopCashback!
I clicked through TCB using their $15 for new Prime memberships offer for a Gift of Prime subscription (using Amazon GC balance) and the $15 tracked and showed up as “Payable” three days later.
At present the minimal terms says
Exclusions: Existing Prime Members and Prime Student. Your Gift Card will be awarded within 45 days after your first complete month of membership.
Don’t see the word new as you noted. Maybe they changed.
I know when this happened last time that I tried it with TopCashback and did not see it track there.
Thanks for the tip! How do you add a prepaid card to the Amazon account?
At the checkout page when you select your payment, at the bottom of your card list there is an Add a debit / credit card link.
Now I’m not positive, but I would think you can add any card you don’t currently have on Amazon and set it’s billing address to a “friend’s” address in NH. As long as you have more gift balance than what you are buying it will not run the card so it won’t find out that the address is incorrect. That’s my belief.
What I did was use a prepaid Visa received from Swagbucks / PrepaidDigitalSolutions and set it’s address to a NH address in the profile. Then add to Amazon. Again, it didn’t show any usage or authorization on the card so I don’t think Amazon even verified that billing address.
Hmmmm… does the tax trick work on regular Amazon purchases? Might as well do it with all my Amazon purchases as I keep a good chunk in gift card balance and keep refilling it for future purchases.
Generally tax is going to be charged based on where a physical item is delivered. You can use gift balance + NH default payment for digital orders that are fulfilled without physical shipping since they are taxed based on billing address.
It’s good for apps, prime/audible subscriptions, and other digital content. I’m like you and I keep a $50-$100 gift balance at most times and I just let everything pull from gift balance. If your default payment’s billing address is in a tax-free state then you will save tax on applicable items and pay it where it is due.
Tesla paid $0 in federal taxes on their $5 billion in profit for 2021 because they utilize the way tax law is written. In their case, they are routing all profits through offshore tax havens, which a normal American can’t do.
Diabolical. And it worked! 😉
Incredible, worked for me too!
“What I did was use a prepaid Visa received from Swagbucks / PrepaidDigitalSolutions and set it’s address to a NH address in the profile” — what is a Swagbucks prepaid visa card?
You mean you cashed out Swagbucks to this prepaid visa card?
Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry I didn’t get to respond to this last night, but I hope you got an order in. It’s now $139.
Thank you Relik.
no worries I got an error while purchasing that the payment method is not allowed. It seems some other people were also facing the same issue. My theory is probably amazon caught on later in the day that current prime members are doing this workaround and stopped it.
That issue (I believe) is that you cannot purchase Prime using a prepaid card *directly. [It breaks the rule that gift cards can’t be used to buy gift cards because Prime can be exchanged for gift card value] I also found that out.
What you can do for future reference is you can reload your account gift card balance with prepaid cards or ANY other payment method and then pay for Prime FULLY from your account gift card balance. I did this myself for 2 Gifts of Prime – it worked up as of Feb 17th.
At that point you can use a NH billing address card (even prepaid) as long as not 1 cent will go towards it. The entire payment must be funded from gift card balance.
Mypoints show as pending for me now after placing a gift of prime order
It seems like Amazon will keep increasing the price by $20 every 4 years. Amazon prime was $79 in 2005 all the way to 2014. Then increased in 2014 to $99, 2018 to $119, 2022 to $139. So the next increase would be in 2026 if they keep following the 4 year price hike.
For me I have found better prices in other sites so I avoid amazon prime. And the benefits is not that attractive to me.
Yeah I have started to notice I need to shop around for some things these days. Easy free 2 day shipping is hard to beat though.
i only have my brother on my account. if i cancel my membership then renew, will i still able to add my brother to my account?
The last time I went through this where I cancelled and then applied the gift of prime after it expired, the other family member on the account never dropped off – it was restored to the same condition as before once prime was restored. Main prime member + 1 connected family member.
Gift of Prime functions like an ordinary Prime membership which allows a second user as part of the family benefit
I tried today with a gift balance and it worked for me, no workarounds needed. Failed every time with gift balance when I tried it the first time this was post.
I think I’m just going to take a Prime break for the time being. And that’s all I have to say about that.