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Amazon Prime is getting more expensive

Updated Apr 26th, 2018 5:54PM EDT
Amazon Prime cost membership annual vs monthly
Image: money.cnn.com

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During its Q1 2018 earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told reporters that Amazon is increasing the price of its annual subscription from $99 per year to $119 per year. The new pricing will apply to all annual renewals starting June 16th and all new subscriptions starting May 11th, so right now would be a really great time to re-up your subscription if you’re an annual member.

Amazon increased the price of its monthly subscription earlier this year, taking it from $10.99 per month to $12.99 per month. Today’s increase to the annual Prime membership makes the pricing a little closer to the monthly cost, but customers are still saving substantially by subscribing to the annual membership rather than monthly.

Amazon announced monster earnings for Q1 2018 today, sending share prices soaring in after-hours trading.  Despite some notable criticism from the White House over the previous quarter, Amazon reported first-quarter earnings of $3.27 per share on sales of $51 billion. Those numbers are significantly better than what analysts expected, and up 43 percent from the same quarter last year.

For Prime specifically, Amazon said that revenue from subscriptions, which primarily means Amazon Prime, were up 56 percent from a year earlier, with revenue of $3.1 billion reported. CEO Jeff Bezos recently revealed that the company has now surpassed 100 million Prime members.

Amazon has slowly increased the cost of an annual Amazon Prime membership to keep up with inflation and account for the new features that Prime members now enjoy. Although the service started out by offering free two-day shipping, members now get access to the Prime Video streaming library, as well as special deals at Whole Foods.

Chris Mills
Chris Mills News Editor

Chris Mills has been a news editor and writer for over 15 years, starting at Future Publishing, Gawker Media, and then BGR. He studied at McGill University in Quebec, Canada.