What happened
Amazon Prime launched in February 2005 at $79 a year and bought exactly one thing: free two-day shipping. It is now $139 — a 76% increase across seventeen years, spread over three increases in 2014, 2018 and 2022.
Four years between each. It is the most predictable schedule on this site, and by that pattern the next increase is already overdue.
Why
Prime is the only entry here where the buyer genuinely got more each time. The $79 membership covered shipping. Today’s $139 covers shipping, Prime Video, Prime Music, photo storage, grocery delivery and a stack of smaller benefits. Amazon added and added, then repriced roughly every four years to reflect it.
That is the defence, and it is partly fair. The other half is that Prime was never really a product. It is a loyalty mechanism: members spend substantially more on Amazon than non-members, so the fee has always mattered less than the behaviour it creates. Amazon can afford to move slowly on price because the membership pays for itself elsewhere.
The bundling has a cost of its own, though. A subscriber who wants only free shipping is now funding a video service, a music service and a photo service, with no way to opt out of the parts they do not use. The 2022 increase was announced as covering wage and fuel inflation — a shipping justification for a bundle that has not been about shipping for a decade.
What you can do instead
The video half of Prime is the easiest piece to replace. A media server you run yourself covers it, and does not renew.