Amazon Prime is a membership program that offers a variety of benefits to its members. These benefits include free two-day shipping on eligible items, access to streaming movies and TV shows, and free music streaming. Prime members also have access to exclusive deals and discounts on Amazon products. ..
Let’s take a look at the numerous perks that come with a Prime membership and, for fun, we’ll even estimate (based on comparable services) how much those Prime benefits are worth.
Prime Video: Instant Access to Movies and TV
Prime Music: All the Tunes? No. Tons of Tunes? Yes.
Can Prime Music compete with the serious heavyweights in the streaming music industry like Spotify? Not necessarily. Does the 2 million song catalog cover most of the stuff you’ll want to listen to? Most likely. Furthermore, it’s always ad free, and you can even store music for offline use like when you’re riding the no-cellular-signal-subway or going for a cross-country run.
Value: Given the cost of comparable services, we’d say this is worth around $60 a year.
Prime Is For Readers: Books and Giveaways
This next section is an amalgam of two distinct and worthwhile Prime features that are especially valuable to avid readers and Kindle owners. First, we have the Prime Reading feature, which gives Prime members access to thousands of free books and magazines. This content is available on both the actual standalone Kindle devices and on mobile devices running the Kindle app, like your iOS or Android tablet. You can read as much as you want, within the Prime Reading category, without limit.
The Kindle First program is worth $5 a month because they’re literally giving you a free book every 30 days that would otherwise cost you five bucks.
Value: Prime book benefits are worth about $120 a year ($10 a month) in our eyes.
Prime Photos: Unlimited Storage & Easy Sharing
You can easily upload your photos from your PC or mobile device, it automatically analyzes and tags your photos so you don’t have to search for members of your own family when you’re looking to print photos of them, and it makes it super easy to collect family photos together.
Value: $60 Dollars
Prime Gaming for Gamers
What do you get with that premium membership? You get an ad-free Twitch experience, Prime exclusives like 20% discounts on new release games, free games, and free in-game content, increased storage for archiving your own streams, and you get a free monthly Twitch channel subscription (which you can use to support your favorite Twitch streamer).
Value: $168 per year at minimum ($14 per month), not even counting the free content and game discounts.
Diapers, Food Deliveries, and Other Deals Too
At this point, we’re starting to move away from the easy-to-value things (like how easily we could put a dollar value of a free Twitch premium account) and into the more nebulous Prime features. These features still offer savings big and small, but they’re not as easy to quantify in terms of a set value.
Prime Same-Day Delivery: Live in a major city like NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, or the like? Your Prime membership also gives you access to rapid delivery, which offers free same-day shipping on select products, including a wide variety of household essentials.
Value: So how do we put a value on all those miscellaneous extras and the benefits of your sharing your account? We’re going to slap $99 on to account for the sharing benefits, the potential discounts, and other perks.
That means, if we round up with a few dollars sprinkled about to account for anything small we might have overlooked, all of the items we’ve listed in this guide total up to $600 of total potential value in a Prime account. All of a sudden, $99 seems like a great deal.
Does that mean you should run out and get a Prime account if you don’t have one now? Probably not, unless you’ll actually use these features. But if you have a Prime membership, or are already considering one, take a serious look at all the benefits you get with your existing Prime account, and make a solid go of taking advantage. You might as well get your money’s worth.
