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We've been seeing streaming services tighten the rules around sharing passwords over the last few years.
Netflix led the charge by cracking down on households sharing accounts, and set an industry standard that many followed.
Disney+ and Hulu implemented similar restrictions, and recently, YouTube Premium Family reportedly requires streaming from a single household or users risk account suspension.
Now, the world's largest online retailer is joining the party with their own version of benefit restrictions.
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Amazon is discontinuing a program that allowed Prime members to share their free shipping benefits with individuals outside their household. According to an update on Amazon's support page, the company will terminate Prime benefit sharing on October 1st, 2025.
Current users who have been sharing benefits with people outside their homes will need to either lose that perk or convince their friends and family to sign up for their own Prime subscriptions.
The tech giant is sweetening the deal slightly by offering these displaced users a discounted rate of $14.99 for the first year, though it jumps to the regular $14.99 monthly rate after that.
This tweak might only impact a relatively small number of users. Amazon stopped allowing new Prime members to join the sharing program way back in 2015, but they let existing users who were already in the system continue sharing their free shipping benefits for a decade.
Amazon is now replacing the old sharing system with 'Amazon Family,' which allows account holders to share Prime benefits only with people who actually live with them. However, the 'Family' must live at the same primary residential address, which Amazon defines as 'the address you consider to be your home and where you spend the majority of your time.'
To clarify, you can still ship items from your account to multiple addresses, and anyone using your Prime account can ship to themselves at different locations. The restriction is specifically about account sharing, not shipping destinations.
People on Reddit have had mixed responses, with some users admitting they didn't know this feature even existed.
"20 years of Prime and I never even knew it had that feature," one user wrote while another asked: "This was a thing?"
Others are considering cancelling their subscription.
"I guess I won’t be doing my Christmas shopping on Amazon," someone else declared.
"I canceled my Prime membership last week in protest of this news," a fourth user added.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Amazon didn't meet their Prime signup goals in the US during their extended Prime Day event in July, despite claiming record signups in the 25 days surrounding the event.
Cutting off benefit sharing could be Amazon's way of forcing more individual subscriptions and potentially helping them hit those membership targets they've been missing.
