Amazon Prime Video Will Soon Charge an Extra $3/Month for an Ad-Free Experience

Amazon Prime Video will soon start charging subscribers an extra $2.99/month for an ad-free experience. Amazon explained today that it will introduce ads on Prime Video in early 2024 so it can keep developing its content strategy, adding that the amount of ads users will see will be reasonable compared to TV.

“To continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time, starting in early 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers,” Amazon explained today.

Ads in Prime Video will first start showing up for subscribers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Canada in early 2024, with France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia to follow later in the year. Prime subscribers will get an email several weeks before the ad-free option becomes available at $2.99/month, but it will launch first in the US

Amazon also confirmed that there won’t be a price hike for Amazon Prime in 2024. In the US, Amazon Prime costs $14.99/month or $139/year, but a standalone subscription for Prime Video costs $8.99/month. That makes it more expensive than Netflix’s Standard with ads plan, which now costs $6.99/month. But of course, if you purchase a lot of things on Amazon, you’ll get more value from a Prime subscription that includes Prime Video at no additional cost.