For the past nine years, Amazon Prime users have received free two-day shipping and a passable lineup of streaming video content for just $79 per year. Alas, the party is over; in an email that went out to subscribers today, Amazon has announced that "as fuel and transportation costs have increased," the annual cost of a Prime membership will increase to $99.
Students, who originally paid just $10 for the service, will now pay $49. And Amazon Fresh users — whose decision to get both consumer products and groceries through the company is the extreme version of Amazon's implicit "never leave your house again" promise — have been rewarded with an unchanged $299 annual fee.
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