How to Share Your Amazon Prime Subscription With Anyone
Prime Day is just around the corner, and to take full advantage of the big sale, you’ll need to become an Amazon Prime member . It typically costs $139 per year or $14.99 per month and includes a host of perks , such as faster shipping on many items and access to the Prime Video streaming service.
Amazon used to allow sharing all membership benefits with a limited number of people, but last year the company tightened the rules, replacing the old system with the Amazon Family program. It now comes with many more restrictions, but they can still be circumvented if you’re comfortable with the limitations.
Share Prime benefits with Amazon Family.
Amazon Family is an existing Prime benefits sharing program that allows you to add separate profiles for one adult living in the same household as the primary account holder and up to four children. This provides access to all standard benefits, such as free shipping, Prime Video with ads, Prime Reading, third-party services like Grubhub, as well as access to audiobooks, ebooks, some games, and Amazon Music.
However, there is still a way to share your Prime benefits with anyone, regardless of whether they live in the same household.
How to Share Amazon Prime Benefits with Anyone
If you want to share benefits with people outside your household, you can still do so—with one important caveat. I’ve been using my parents’ Prime account for years, simply logging in with their email and password. This comes with the inconvenience of mixing order histories and payment methods, but it’s an easy way to share a Prime subscription without restrictions—I can use it even if I live in another state, just like my siblings.
The biggest potential issue is that you may sometimes need to provide one-time passwords (OTPs) from the primary account holder when logging into a new account (or logging out for any reason). OTPs may also be required when attempting to change certain subscription settings.
To keep your data somewhat separate, you can create separate profiles under a single Amazon Prime account, but everyone will still have access to the same order history, addresses, payment methods, subscriptions, return information, and so on. If you’re comfortable with this from a privacy standpoint, it’s easy, though it does require some extra attention—I’ve made the mistake several times and sent orders to family members’ homes or used their credit cards, and vice versa.
Given that many people would find all of the above inconvenient, it’s not surprising that Amazon hasn’t yet considered this workaround, though that doesn’t guarantee the company won’t make it harder (or impossible) to share accounts this way in the future.