Say Goodbye to Sharing Amazon Prime Free Shipping Benefits
If you’ve taken advantage of Prime’s free shipping as an invited Prime customer, you’ve been officially notified: Amazon is shutting down the program soon. The company is reaching out to affected customers to confirm the change: On October 1, 2025, the Invitee program will end, and with it the ability to order from Amazon with free shipping.
The Prime Invitee program gave Prime subscribers the opportunity to share the benefits of free shipping with a limited number of standard Amazon account holders. It didn’t include other Prime benefits, like Prime Video , but participating Amazon users could take advantage of key Prime benefits without having to pay a full subscription.
How to Keep Free Shipping Benefits After Prime Invitee Ends
If you were using free shipping on items purchased from another Prime account holder, your Amazon account will revert to a basic account starting next month. However, Amazon is offering two solutions for affected users.
Amazon Family
First, you can join a Prime subscriber account as part of the Amazon Family program . This program allows a Prime member to share their benefits with another adult outside their household, which is the same address where the paying account holder lives. This is similar to the metrics that services like Netflix and HBO Max use to determine who has access to a particular account.
If a Prime member wants to share their benefits with Amazon users outside their household, they can only choose one adult. The plan also allows for up to four teens (whose accounts were added before April 7, 2025) and up to four child profiles.
Amazon Family offers more benefits than the Invitee program: in addition to free shipping, you get Prime Video with ads, Prime Reading, third-party benefits like Grubhub, audiobooks, ebooks, some games, and Amazon Music.
Discount on the first year of Prime
If the Prime member chooses another adult, you still have a second option to avoid paying the full price for a Prime subscription. Amazon is offering Invitee members a discount on a $14.99 Prime subscription for one year. According to the email, you can sign up for the discount from September 5 to December 31 (the offer is currently not running, but you’ll likely need to use a unique link or be previously invited to get the discount). After that year, you’ll be required to pay the full price for the subscription. As of this writing, that’s $14.99 per month or $139 per year, but prices could be higher by this time next year.
Does this change affect shared inputs?
Some users who share Prime benefits may not have their own Amazon accounts; instead, they share a login with a Prime subscriber. This creates the inconvenience of mixing order history and payment methods, but it’s an easy way to share a Prime membership.
For now, Amazon doesn’t seem to be imposing any restrictions on this kind of shared activity: after October 1, you’ll still be able to sign into another user’s Amazon account and take advantage of their Prime benefits, as long as you agree to share the account itself. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon decided to allow login sharing in the future, though it might be tricky — unlike Netflix, people often shop outside their home, so monitoring shared logins might not be as easy as blocking unknown IP addresses from new devices.