Amazon Prime costs $139 a year or $14.99 a month in the U.S., and the annual price hasn’t changed since February 2022, when it went up from $119. Pay monthly for twelve months and you spend $179.88, about $41 more than the annual plan for exactly the same membership. If you’re on the monthly plan out of habit, that’s the first thing to fix.
The bigger question is whether you need it at all. Amazon’s list of Prime benefits runs from same-day delivery to cheaper gas to photo storage, and the length of that list is part of the sales pitch. In practice, most households get real value from a handful of perks and none from the rest. The math only works if you count the perks you’d actually pay for some other way.
With both of this year’s members-only sales over (Prime Day ran June 23 to 26, and Prime Big Deal Days ran October 6 and 7) and Black Friday on November 27, early November is a good time to decide. Here’s how I’d work through it.
Shipping is most of what you’re paying for
Without Prime, Amazon generally ships eligible orders free once they reach $35, and books qualify at $25, though the minimum can vary by area. Prime drops the minimum and adds speed. Amazon says more than 300 million items ship free with Prime, and tens of millions of popular items qualify for free same-day or one-day delivery.
So start with your own order history. Open Your Orders, scroll back three months and look at the size of each order and how soon you needed it. If most orders cleared $35 or could have waited a few days and gone out together, Prime’s shipping is saving you very little. If the list is full of $9 and $14 orders for things you needed by the next day, shipping alone may justify the fee.
Grocery is the other half of the delivery story. Prime members get free same-day delivery on Amazon grocery orders over $25 in most areas where it’s available. For a household that orders groceries every week, this perk usually does more of the work than anything else on the list. For a household that shops in person, it’s worth nothing.
The perks that count only if you’d pay for them anyway
Everything else falls into one of two groups: things you’d otherwise pay for, and things that are pleasant to have but that you’d never buy on their own. Only the first group belongs in the math.
- Prime Video. Included, but with ads since early 2024. Removing the ads costs extra, and the add-on was $2.99 a month when Amazon introduced it. If Prime Video is the main reason you keep Prime, compare it with the streaming service you’d pick in its place.
- Gas. Members save 10 cents a gallon at more than 7,500 bp, Amoco and participating ampm and Thorntons stations. Amazon’s own estimate is nearly $70 a year, based on someone buying about 675 gallons. No participating station on your regular route means no savings.
- Prescriptions and care. RxPass covers a list of common generic medications for $5 a month, and Prime members can get a One Medical membership for $9 a month or $99 a year. Valuable if you’d use them, irrelevant if you wouldn’t.
- Alexa+. Amazon’s upgraded voice assistant is included with Prime and listed at $19.99 a month without it. That only matters if you’d pay for it.
- Music, reading and photos. Prime includes an Amazon Music catalog in shuffle mode, Prime Reading and unlimited full-resolution photo storage with 5 GB for video. Nice extras. Very few people would pay for them on their own.
A way to score it in five minutes
Take a sheet of paper and make two columns. In the first, write each perk you’d pay for if Prime disappeared tomorrow, with what you’d spend on it per year. Use real numbers from your own life: the delivery fees you’d pay on grocery orders, the streaming service you’d switch to, the gas you buy at a participating station. In the second column, write the perks you like but wouldn’t replace.
Ignore the second column. Add up the first. If it clears $139, keep the annual plan. If it lands well below, you have a shipping subscription that isn’t paying for itself.
A made-up example shows how lopsided this can get. Picture a two-person household that orders from Amazon about once a month, usually more than $35 at a time, shops for groceries in person, and watches Prime Video a couple of times a month. Their first column might hold only the streaming service they’d switch to. That’s a long way from $139. A household with a weekly grocery order, a teenager who orders school supplies on Sunday night for Monday, and a bp station on the commute is an entirely different story.
Pay less before you cancel
A few changes cut the cost without giving anything up.
- Share it. Amazon Family (the program long known as Amazon Household) lets a member share Prime benefits with one other adult and up to four children in the household. Two adults paying for two memberships under one roof is money spent twice for one set of benefits.
- Switch to annual, if you’re keeping it for the whole year. The $40.88 difference is the easiest saving on this page.
- Check the discounted plans. Prime for Young Adults covers ages 18 to 24 and college students, with a six-month free trial and then $7.49 a month or $69 a year. Prime Access is $6.99 a month after a 30-day trial for customers who receive qualifying government assistance or pass income verification. Both carry the same benefits at about half the price.
Who should cancel, and how to time it
The clearest candidates are people who joined for a sale. If you signed up for Prime Day or Prime Big Deal Days and haven’t used it much since, both events are behind you for 2026. Members who order a few times a year and can batch orders to $35 are in the same position.
Canceling doesn’t have to be permanent, either. Monthly Prime is a tool, and you can pick it up for just the months you need. Some people keep it only for December, when gift deadlines make fast free shipping worth $14.99, and let it lapse the rest of the year. If you haven’t had a free trial recently, Amazon offers a 30-day one to eligible customers, which can cover a holiday month entirely.
Leaving should also be straightforward now. In September 2025, Amazon agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over Prime sign-ups and cancellations, including $1.5 billion in refunds to customers. Under the settlement terms, Amazon has to show a clear button to decline Prime and offer an easy way to cancel through the same method you used to sign up.
What else is out there
If you mainly want free shipping and grocery delivery, Walmart+ is the obvious comparison. It runs $12.95 monthly or $98 for the year, a price Walmart hasn’t changed since the service launched in 2020. Members get free shipping with no minimum on items shipped from Walmart.com, free same-day delivery from local stores once an order reaches $35, a Paramount+ Essential or Peacock Premium subscription they can switch every 90 days, and 10 cents off a gallon at Walmart, Exxon, Mobil and Murphy USA stations. A family that already does its weekly shopping at Walmart may get more from it than from Prime, for $41 less a year.
The other alternative is no membership at all. The big general retailers mostly offer free standard shipping to non-members somewhere around $35, and picking up in store costs nothing. For a household that plans ahead, that covers most of what a delivery membership does.
Whatever you decide, open the Prime membership page in your account today and look at two things: which plan you’re on, monthly or annual, and the date it renews. Put that date in your calendar a week early, and make the keep-or-cancel call on purpose instead of letting the renewal make it for you.
