How much does an Amazon Prime subscription cost around the world?

Amazon Prime is Amazon’s all-encompassing subscription service. With the monolithic brand moving from originally just retail onto streaming, gaming, food shopping, and more over the years, it makes sense to have a monthly plan that allows regular customers to maximize their experience. But it’s also a real cash cow for Amazon, and it’s not cheap in the US — Americans are charged $14.99 per month for Prime membership. What you may not know is that this isn’t the standard price in every country. In fact, there’s a vast difference in the subscription cost as you cross borders. To give you a better idea, we’ve broken down how much an Amazon Prime subscription costs around the world.

To be clear, we’re looking at the price of the full Amazon Prime subscription here, as opposed to the cost of Prime Video. The latter is included with a Prime membership but can be bought separately in many regions if you only want the streaming service and not the other benefits. We’ve not touched on the cost of Prime Video in this article, but you can be sure that it’s roughly proportionate to the cost of the full Prime subscription.

We’ll give you a quick answer and then break down the numbers.

How much does an Amazon Prime subscription cost around the world?

The table below shows the Amazon Prime subscription cost in almost every country the retailer operates. Most nations have both a monthly price or an annual plan, which is cheaper than paying month-to-month. We’ve converted the local price into the equivalent amount in US dollars for the purpose of the comparison and ranked the countries from cheapest to most expensive.

The table shows that the Amazon Prime subscription cost varies hugely depending on your region. The monthly plan is cheapest in Egypt at the equivalent of just $0.94 per month, while it’s most expensive in the United States at $14.99. In other words, it’s more than 15 times more expensive for Americans to sign up than Egyptians. The annual subscription price in Egypt is almost half the monthly cost in the US.

Egypt may be extraordinarily cheap, but it isn’t an outlier. Most countries pay somewhere between $3 and $7 per month for Amazon Prime, which may come as a shock to US residents. Despite the company being incorporated in America, natives are paying the most in the world by some distance. We’ll consider why this might be later on.

It’s interesting to note how varied the subscription cost is in neighboring countries with similar infrastructure. For example, Belgians pay only $3.01 for a monthly subscription, but their French counterparts a few miles away over the border pay more than twice that at $7.56.

Another curious discrepancy is how the relative costs of the monthly and annual plans differ between nations. For example, residents of Poland pay $2.75 for one month or $12.24 for a year, so the annual plan is the equivalent of five monthly payments and a great deal if you plan to use Amazon Prime for 12 months. Meanwhile, UK customers can pay $11.41 per month or $120.50 for a year — the latter only saving them $16.42 in total.

Turkey and Singapore are the two countries on the list that don’t have the option of an annual plan as far as we can tell. But being the second and third cheapest nations for a monthly plan, they can’t complain. China is the one country left off the list altogether, as it appears Amazon Prime is being withdrawn as a service there.

With a VPN able to mask your IP address and spoof your location, it could theoretically be possible to sign up for Amazon Prime as if you’re a resident of another country. This might be tempting to US residents with thoughts of getting the service for a fraction of the price they’re currently paying. But the reality is that it’s probably not practicable and certainly not advisable.

For a start, it probably takes more than just a local IP address to sign up for Amazon Prime. We’ll happily confess that we haven’t tried it, but you probably need to provide a payment method, such as a debit card, that’s linked to a bank in that country. This is something that’s much harder to imitate. Even if you were able to overcome this hurdle somehow, you’d be getting products and services specific to that country. That’s not to say the subscription would be completely useless to you, but it’s not a cheaper like-for-like alternative.

In any event, this behavior isn’t something that Amazon would approve of. It’s a legal grey spot at best and almost certainly in breach of Amazon’s terms of service. Aside from any other possible sanctions, Amazon will no doubt remove your account as and when your ploy is uncovered.

One of the main reasons Amazon Prime is cheaper in some countries is that there is less content and different benefits. Licensing agreements, local market demands, and regional regulations all play a part here. Just on Prime Video alone, there are many more English-language movies and TV shows, giving more choice for English-speaking consumers.

The various costs to Amazon associated with the service also come into play. For example, one of the big benefits of Prime is free one- or two-day shipping, and this is likely to be more costly to Amazon in certain nations.

There’s also the spending power of the user base to consider. There’s no point in pricing most people in the region out of the service. Amazon will have set its prices to maximize the bottom line, so it needs to consider all its expenses and then what the majority of potential subscribers can afford in each country. Combining these considerations will allow Amazon to find a sweet spot for revenue and profit generation.

Put all of that together, and you can start to see why the US has the most expensive monthly Amazon Prime subscription. There will be significant costs to Amazon, more content and benefits available on the service, and a large market demand from consumers with greater disposable income.

We also have to acknowledge a quirk of our comparison method. We converted all the prices into US dollars for this exercise, but currency exchange rates have fluctuated greatly in recent years. For instance, Turkey is experiencing very high inflation, so it’s not surprising to see a service in that country being very cheap in USD terms.