What Amazon Prime members have lost over the years – from shipping pricing to adverts and more

Roll back something like a decade or more, and you might just return to a time when Amazon Prime felt like one of the best deals around. This simple membership gave you pretty serious savings on shipping at the already-huge retailer, as well as access to its steadily growing library of streaming movies and shows.

When we recently wrote about the death of Amazon's Try Before You Buy service, though, it got us thinking about some of the other bits and pieces that Amazon has sliced away from Prime over the years (while the membership's prices have steadily grown).

Now, to be clear, if you go back and look at the launch prices of any number of tech companies, from Netflix to Disney+, you'll find sad numbers compared with today's. Still, we got our thinking caps on and found the below list of defunct offerings that Prime no longer includes – as a reminder of better days.

Try Before You Buy

As mentioned, Try Before You Buy was what prompted all this thinking, and it's been confirmed that Amazon's ending the service on 31 January after years in which it was included with Prime. This basically let you order up to six bits of clothing from certain sellers, and only be charged for any that you decided to keep after trying them on.

It gave people real flexibility to shop online without worrying about waiting for refunds on their returns, but very soon will no longer be available. Of course, those who rightly decry fast fashion will point out that this is great for cutting down on unnecessary emissions and disposable clothing, but others will counter that it's nonetheless an occasionally useful feature that's being thrown away.

Ad-free Prime Video

When it comes to Prime Video, there are a lot of ways you could look at the value Amazon has offered over the years. On the one hand, for example, you have more content than ever right now, including more originals, and you also get 4K resolution where possible, since Amazon hasn't ever resorted to locking resolutions behind paywalls. That makes it one of the best streaming services by any measure.

However, there's also no getting away from the fact that Prime Video used to be a one-plan service, where you paid for access and got everything without ads. Now, though, you have to pay a supplement to make your content ad-free, which makes for a more expensive subscription unless you're fine with those annoying breaks.

It's been one of the most obviously impactful changes to the subscription that Amazon's ever made, and it's impossible to argue that it's a positive.

Always-free shipping

Way back when it first launched, Prime was a really simple proposition – you paid a monthly or annual price, and got completely free shipping. This would typically be faster than you would otherwise get, but regardless of how long it would take, it would be free.

Sadly, that's no longer the case, although the explanation underlines how minor the issue is. If you want same-day shipping, something that can only ever be accessed on certain products and in some locations anyway, you now have to pay a little fee to make it happen. Again, I'd argue this isn't a big deal for almost anyone, since same-day shipping is clearly labour and emission-intensive, but given that it used to be included for free, it's nonetheless a miss.

Free Dolby Atmos

I've included this as another example of the sort of benefit that some people simply won't notice, whether because they're not using a surround sound system or because they don't much care, but in early 2024 people started to notice that they were no longer getting Dolby Atmos sound from Prime Video.

Upon investigation, it was confirmed that Amazon was putting the top-quality sound option behind the same supplementary payment as the no-ads version of Prime Video, so even if you didn't mind adverts, you'd need to upgrade for the best surround sound.

Pricing

Of course, there's no getting away from the single biggest and most obvious change that you'd encounter if you went back to check out Amazon Prime 10 years ago – its price. Amazon hasn't necessarily enacted annual price rises, and it's still really easy to make the case for Prime's value overall, but it's clearly gone up by a pretty heft margin.

It launched at $79 per year in the US, but now costs $139; in the UK it launched at £49 but now costs £95. In both cases that comes out to around double the cost – but also in each case, Prime has been around for nearly 20 years, which makes that margin feel less of an issue.

In fact, this all brings us round to the reason we tallied this (far from exhaustive) list up in the first place. It underlines the fact that Amazon's top-level pricing still doesn't feel unfair for what you get, by any stretch. However, by occasionally removing a feature or locking it behind an additional monthly cost, the membership has been a little diluted over time.