I really want to get Amazon Prime but spending $99 all at once is too much for me right now. I do subscribe to Kindle Unlimited for $9.99 monthly, so the Prime membership would save me money in the long run, since Kindle Unlimited is included with Prime. I'm working on saving the money for the membership but thought perhaps there might be a coupon or discount offered somewhere. I don't know that I'd use the streaming benefits, but I would love to get the free shipping. With the total now being $35 in order to qualify for free shipping, I rarely get to take advantage of it. I usually like to grab just the deals I find and that's rarely more than $10 at a time.
The cheapest way is the student discount, you need is an edu email address, so I shared mine with friends so they could use my account. It's $49, so even if you sign up for a local college and get an email address you are still eligible. If you have a family member with an edu address and they don't want Amazon ask them?
As far as I have seen, there is no way to get Amazon Prime on payments. You are actually paying that much (and more) just to have the Kindle Unlimited, but even of you had Prime, the Unlimited is not one of the benefits, I am pretty sure. It does come with the Kindle Lending library, which is pretty much the same book selection; but only one book per month is allowed. So, if you don't read a wholle bunch of books every month; then having the prime account gives you more benefits. You have the 2-day free shipping on everything designated as Prime, you have all of the prime movies, some are free, and some are either rent or buy. There is also the subscription plan where you save money on things that you re-order all of the time, like (for example) toilet paper or paper towels. We have had a prime account for about 2 years now, and feel like it is definitely worth the cost, just hard to find that $100 every time you renew. Possibly they will modify that in the future so that more people will sign up for Prime ?
Luckily for you, you are in the US where a lot of sites will give you free Amazon points from working on surveys. Have you tried any of them? Also, to save money from your annual fee, do you have any children? If you do, you could sign up under them and only pay $49 a year, so you see, you have options.
I think I would work on one of the sites that will give you a gift card that can be used to pay for the cost of the Prime membership. In fact I am on one of those sites right now and was thinking about my cash out and what I would do with it, I just use it to pay for my Prime so I can see more movies.
I'm assuming that you want it right now to get the free shipping for the holidays, so wait until the first of December and sign up for the trial and use it like crazy during the month. After that, sign up for Bing Rewards, follow the instructions and collect the $5 Amazon cards, put them on your account and buy Prime. You can also do a few tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk to cut down the amount of time you would need to spend on both AMT and Bing Rewards. If you do what you are supposed to do, you can have a "free" Amazon Prime by the end of March, even sooner if you're willing to pay for part of it yourself.
Happyflowerlady, I thought the Kindle Unlimited was a benefit of Prime membership, but I reviewed the benefits after seeing your response and realized I must have mistaken the Lending Library for Unlimited. I guess I really don't have a pressing reason to get Prime now, as I can just as easily save up my purchases to do $35 at a time in order to get free shipping. I do like the suggestion to save up my Amazon gift cards, though, so if I decide to go through with Prime, I'll do this in order to pay for it. As I mentioned above, though, there really isn't a need for Prime like I had thought.
I think that it depends on how much you order from Amazon, and how much you read; which is best. I don't read a lot because I am usually busy doing other things online; so the lending library and the free Amazon books are plenty for me. I don't order a whole lot, but definitely I order enough to make the free shipping worthwhile. Most of the books in the Kindle Unlimited are also the ones in the lending library from what i have read; so you would have access to the same books, but only one a month. Plus the free books; but you can get those anyway. All you need is the Kindle app to download them to, so you don't even have to have a Kindle to get the free books. I love the free books ! They change them about every day, so one that was $10 yeaterday, might be free today, but tomorrow it will be $10 again. You just put in the author or subject, search by price low to high, and you will get the free ones on that subject first, then the 99 cent ones, etc. Defintely get the one month free trial ! You can't go wrong with that, and can try out all of the services for free. I think that either Dish network or Direct TV has a special where they paid for your first year of Prime, with a satellite membership, but I don't know if it is still going or not.
The only cost friendly way of getting Amazon Prime for cheap is a free trial. The other way is to ride on someone else prime membership. Other than that you have to pay the yearly fee in order to get their service.
