Amazon Prime—a.k.a. the only streaming service whose offerings include The Man In The High Castle, Transparent, and free shipping any time you buy a new pair of headphones or a bag of dog food from the internet—is about to get a little more pricey. For some users, at least: Recode reports today that the service is bouncing its monthly pricing up from $10.99 to $12.99, an increase of 18 percent that bumps Prime’s annual cost up to $156 a year for month-to-month users.
The pricing change won’t affect the company’s annual plan, which will continue to cost $99 a year. It’s still rough news for the low-income customers the monthly rate was designed to target, though, ones who couldn’t necessarily justify a single hundred-dollar lump sum for a year of TV streaming and inexpensive shipping. It also pushes the service’s price well above the $10.99 monthly rate being charged by its chief competitor, Netflix.
The change comes as Amazon’s video production side seems poised for a big (and expensive) change in its programming strategies; the company just canceled a number of low-budget TV products, and is reportedly hunting around for big, flashy TV shows and movies to round out its library of content.
