How to avoid the Amazon Prime price increase

If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, you most likely heard that the company is increasing the program’s cost by $20. If you don’t want to pay the additional amount but do have some extra funds, you can get around the increase for years to come. Here’s how…

How to avoid the Amazon Prime price increase

1. Cancel your Prime subscription
2. Purchase Amazon Prime gift card
3. Apply the gift card every 12 months

1. Cancel your Prime subscription

This seems strange, but the first thing you need to do is cancel your Prime membership. To do this, head to the Amazon Prime membership page and click on the “End My Benefits” button. While this might seem counterintuitive, don’t worry, your Prime account won’t actually get canceled until your renewal date.

2. Purchase Amazon Prime gift card

Next, you will need to purchase a $99 12-month Amazon Prime gift card. It is vital that you do this before May 11 when the gift card cost will be increased to $129. Thankfully, Amazon doesn’t limit the number of cards you purchase, so you could theoretically buy your next 10 years of Prime for $99 a year using this workaround.

Do note that Amazon might change its rules at a future date and require new members to pay the extra amount not covered by the gift card’s original cost.

3. Apply the gift card every 12 months

Now that you have the digital gift card, you just need to apply it to your Prime membership before it expires.

As the Wirecutter notes, if you have an older grandfathered account from before 2015 with “full family features,” you might want to skip this workaround. Unfortunately, the process of canceling your subscription potentially removes these features.

If you have any questions, make sure to leave them in the comment section below or hit me up on Twitter.

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: