How much does Prime Video cost globally?

Whether you’re watching blockbusters like “Inception” or original series like “The Boys,” Amazon Prime Video is one of the top streaming options on the market. In the US, it costs $8.99 per month, which is pretty standard for a premium service, but not this price in other countries. Prices for monthly plans vary greatly depending on your country, which got us wondering where the cheapest and most expensive might be. We decided to look into Prime Video fees around the world. You’ll find the answer below.

It’s important to note that Prime Video is not the same as Amazon Prime, but you do get the former when you subscribe to the latter. In many countries, you can get Prime Video for a lower price on its own, which is what we’re talking about in this article. Prime Video is available in some countries, but not as a standalone service, which means you can only get it with the full Amazon Prime plan.

We’ll reveal the prices in each country and then answer some other questions you might have in mind.

How much does a Prime Video subscription cost worldwide?

The table below shows the cost of Prime Video in 28 countries. While prices are charged in each location’s local currency, we’ve converted them to equivalent U.S. dollar values ​​at the date of publication and then arranged the table from cheapest to most expensive.

Prices for monthly plans vary quite a bit around the world, and we’ll explain why this is the case later. Of the countries we looked at, Egypt has the cheapest Prime Video plan at just $0.61 per month. Türkiye and Nigeria are the second cheapest, with monthly subscriptions both costing less than $2 each.

Frustratingly but not surprisingly, the $8.99 per month you pay in the US is the most expensive Prime Video plan of any country. This means Americans pay more than ten times more than Egyptians for this service. The rest of the bottom spots are occupied by Western European countries.

What are we missing?

Unlike the full Amazon Prime service, Prime Video is available in more than 200 countries. It would take us all day to write and tire you of reading if we checked them all out, so we’ve taken a representative sample from some of the largest markets in every corner of the globe. We can’t definitively say there’s no place cheaper than Egypt or more expensive than the United States, but it’s likely that most prices are between $3 and $7, as are most places in our survey.

We also didn’t include the cost of the annual plan, because only about half of the countries we studied offer it. To give you an idea, in most cases it’s about eight to nine times the monthly plan cost, so you only need to commit to 12 months and get a few months for free. But there are exceptions – annual subscriptions in Poland are only about five times more than monthly subscriptions, so a year-round subscription is a no-brainer.

In some cases, the situation becomes more complicated. For example, in some countries you can’t sign up for Prime Video separately, and Amazon requires you to get a full Prime membership to access the streaming service. Saudi Arabia falls into this category. The same is true in India, although it also has an option called Prime Lite, which is cheaper and includes Prime Video. You can only pay for Prime Lite on an annual basis, and if we divide this annual cost by 12 to represent the monthly cost of Prime Video in India, then it will be the second cheapest on the list at $0.80 per month.

In addition to workarounds like this, we’ve also listed the cheapest monthly plans in each country. In some places, like the UK and Mexico, you can pay more to get an ad-free version of Prime Video.

People who are familiar with VPNs may have seen the lowest prices in other countries and wondered if they could take advantage of the system.

One of the many benefits of a VPN is the ability to spoof your location, making it appear as if you are in a different city or country. In some cases, this can allow you to bypass geo-restricted content. In fact, we had to use a VPN to find out how much Prime Video costs in each country, and you might consider going a step further and trying to sign up. We advise against this, and in any case, it may not be that simple.

If you try it, we doubt you’ll check out online. Amazon will almost certainly require you to use an address and payment method based on the country from which you are accessing the service on your own behalf. The address may be simple, but foreign banks may arouse suspicion, and you are unlikely to have a source of payment in that country.

In addition to the risk of some kind of fraud in such a program, you may also be violating the Prime Video Terms of Service. You won’t be the first to try this, and Amazon will continually try to root out VPN users trying to save money. When you are caught, you will at least lose your membership. It’s not worth taking all this risk and hassle to save a few bucks every month.

Before we explore the role of market forces, we will acknowledge that converting all prices to U.S. dollars affects this survey. It helps us make comparisons, but exchange rates are dynamic and the global economy has been volatile over the past decade. If a currency falls sharply against the US dollar, then it rises in the table, and the story would be different if we ran this experiment over another six months or a year.

This is especially true when a country is experiencing extremely high inflation, as Argentina has been in recent years. Even though Amazon has increased the price of Prime Video in recent months, it’s still one of the cheapest on the list, but it’s certainly not getting any cheaper for Argentines.

More objectively, Amazon might point out differences in service content around the world. Since many of the movies and shows on Prime Video are made for Western English-speaking audiences, it’s no surprise that the United States is the most expensive country to watch. But there are other factors at play.

Ultimately, a big reason for the price difference will be Amazon’s costs and the profit it wants to make. Related to the above point, the cost of running Prime Video is higher in some countries than others, including paying licensing fees for certain content. Then, there’s also the spending power of consumers and the revenue Amazon’s financial experts believe can be earned from each market. Business is business, and there’s a reason why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world.