Are you too cheap to pay the $14.95 per month (or $139 per year) that Amazon now charges for their Amazon Prime membership? Well, I don’t blame you.
But that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the 2022 Amazon Prime Day on July 12 and July 13, 2022. That’s because you can get a free 30-day trial membership to Amazon Prime that offers everything a paid membership offers.
That’s right. As long as you have never been a Prime member in the past, Amazon will give you 30 days to enjoy all the perks of Prime member ship for exactly ZERO dollars.
At the end of the 30 day period, they’ll start billing you. Which means you’ll have to mark your calendar if you want to escape the monthly fee.
However, ya never know. You may find that you love all of the Amazon Prime perks and won’t mind a monthly debit on your credit card.
Amazon Prime benefits
These are some of the benefits you’ll get from an Amazon Prime membership.
- Prime Day on July 12 and 13 with biggest discounts and savings of the year.
- Early PrimeDay deals
- Free, super fast shipping.
- Access to Prime video
- Unlimited cloud storage of photos and 5GB of video storage
- Whole Foods discounts
- Link your Amazon Prime account with one other adult to share Prime benefits
For me, the free shipping alone pays for my Prime membership many times over every year. I rarely have to wait more than a few days for my order to arrive.
I use Prime video quite a bit, too. And I probably should start using the free cloud storage for my images. You really do get quite a bit for your money.
Amazon Prime Plan details
For a regular Joe like you and me
Amazon Prime is $14.99 a month or $139 a year. With the Annual plan, you’ll save about $40 per year over the monthly.
For a student
Things get even better for students. Rather than a 30-day trial membership, you’ll get 6 months free. Based on the date of this writing, that will take you all the way through Christmas. From then on, you’ll be charged $7.49 per month, which is half of the regular price.
Amazon Prime Day, July 12 and 13, 2022
Amazon Prime Day is only for Amazon Prime members and features the greatest savings and discounts of the year. Considering that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are yet to come in 2022, that’s saying a mouthful.
Even with the 30-day trial (or 6 month trial if you’re a student), you’ll still qualify for all of the deep discounts on Prime Day. And you’ll get free, fast shipping to boot.
There are also plenty of early discounts leading up to Prime Day. You can check some of those more techie stuff here on Wired.com.
There will be plenty of deals leading up to Prime Day, as well as Deals of the Day on the magic day, itself.
Prime stamp card
Another promotion Amazon has going on is the Prime Stampcard. If you collect all four stamps by 23.59 ET on July 13, you’ll receive a $10 credit that will show up in your Amazon account. These are the four stamps they want you to collect.
- Make a Prime eligible purchase
- Stream a show on Prime Video
- Listen to a song on Amazon Music Prime
- Borrow a eBook Prime Reading
You’ll need to activate your Stampcard by following this link in order to participate. It sounds good to me. $10 is $10.
Should you keep your Amazon Prime membership?
There’s no harm in cancelling your trial membership before it converts to a paid plan after 30-days. If you decide later that you want to get Prime again, I’m sure Amazon will welcome your business. They just won’t give you another free trial.
I have had a Prime membership for 3 years. Just in shipping alone, I found that my membership pays for itself many times over every year. But that’s because I place a lot of orders.
In 2020, I placed 103 separate orders. In 2021, I placed 106. If I were to assign an average shipping cost of $5 per order, that would come out to roughly $500. Based on $119 per year that I paid for those years (the annual fee just increased to $139 in February 2022), I saved about $375 in shipping costs.
The less quantifiable benefit is the lightning quick speed that I received those orders because of Prime. Fast delivery is something that’s easy to get used to. And hard to give up.
To be honest, I don’t use Prime Video all that much. And I have never used the photo and video cloud storing service (though I probably should). If I had a Whole Foods near me, I might use that perk more than I do.
The bottom line is that $139 a year is a bargain just for saving on shipping alone if you do a lot of business with Amazon. As for the rest of the perks, they’re icing on the cake.