Cancelling Amazon Prime
A few days ago I cancelled Amazon Prime. Their price increase for ad-free Prime Video was the final tipping point. I am more than happy to pay for content. I have an active family subscription for YouTube Premium. I wasn’t bothered by Netflix and Disney raising their prices. But Amazon really managed to make everything they have so unappealing that it felt like the right time to cancel.
I was paying around 90 Euro per year for Amazon Prime. And I absolutely got my moneys worth. I used Twitch Prime to support a streamer I am regularly watching every month. That is 48 Euro per year already. Prime Gaming is linked to my Riot account and my wife’s Blizzard account. So one or two freebies a month for each of us. And while I try to not shop on Amazon if I can avoid it, I still placed a few orders every year making up the rest in shipping fees saved. Not having Prime made my wife reconsidering where to shop as she finds the whole experience extremely annoying now.
Prime Day is one of the things I cannot take seriously and is not a deciding factor. Nearly everything I looked at the last few years was more expensive than at other online shops. More often than not more expensive than at local retailers. At least for the duration of Prime Day. Regular prices a few days later were on par with local offers again. Not a scam at all...
But what really triggered me was the audacity to ask for more money for Prime Video. Especially after clicking through their “here, watch other stuff we made before we show you what you actually want to see” stunt.
I like watching Grand Tour. And we recently started a rewatch of Supernatural. But that is it for me. My wife watches a few more shows. But nothing Prime Video produced the last few years had any appeal to me. It is not as bad as Netflix’s kitchen sink approach, but also nothing worth my time.
On top of that the Prime Video app on the AppleTV is simply garbage. It takes a long time for me to make such a statement about software. Especially if there is a chance an engineer working on it reads it. This app cannot remember anything I did. Literally nothing. Logged in user? Nope. Last watched episode? Nope. Last shows watched? Barely. Good luck finding it in the list of “recommendations”. Scrolling back or forth? Good one, but technically at least possible. The Prime Video app is singlehandedly the most annoying application I had on the AppleTV and the one I always dreaded opening.
Paying additional 3 Euro a month would not break the bank. But paying more money to not see ads (while Netflix introduced an ad supported cheaper tier) in the two shows I am watching while fighting the app on every click? Hard sell. Adding a certain disliking for the rest of their practices made this an easy choice at the end of the day. I refuse to use the word starting with "e" everyone randomly throws around when a corporation does something they dislike. But it would be appropriate here.