How much does Prime Video cost around the world?

Whether you’re after blockbuster movies like Inception or original series like The Boys, Amazon Prime Video is one of the top streaming service options on the market. It costs $8.99 per month in the USA, which is fairly standard for one of the premium services, but that’s not how much you’d pay in another country. The price of the monthly plan changes significantly depending on your home nation, which made us wonder where it might be cheapest and most expensive. We decided to investigate how much Prime Video costs around the world. You’ll find the answers below.

It’s important to note that Prime Video isn’t the same thing as Amazon Prime, but you do get the former included when you subscribe to the latter. You can pay a separate, lower price to get Prime Video on its own in many countries, which is what we’re looking at in this article. There are some nations where Prime Video is available but not as a separate service, meaning you can only get it with a full Amazon Prime plan.

We’ll reveal the prices in each country and then answer some other questions that they might pose in your mind.

How much does a Prime Video subscription cost around the world?

The table below shows how much Prime Video costs in 28 countries. While the prices are charged in the local currency of each place, we’ve converted them to the equivalent US dollar value on the date of publication, then ordered the table from cheapest to most expensive.

The difference in the price of the monthly plan around the world is pretty huge, and we’ll go into why this is the case later on. Of the countries we surveyed, Egypt has the cheapest Prime Video plan at the equivalent of just $0.61 per month. Turkey and Nigeria are the next cheapest, respectively, both paying under $2 per month for the subscription.

Depressingly but unsurprisingly, the $8.99 per month that you pay in the US is the most expensive Prime Video plan of any country. That means that Americans are paying more than ten times that of Egyptians for the service. The other places at the pricey end of the list are all held by Western European countries.

What are we missing?

Unlike the full Amazon Prime service, Prime Video is available in over 200 countries. It would take us all day to write and bore you to read if we had checked them all, so we took a representative sample from some of the biggest markets in every corner of the globe. We can’t definitively say that there are none cheaper than Eygpt or more expensive than the US, but it is likely that most would be in the range from $3 to $7, like most of the places in our survey.

We also didn’t include the cost of the annual plan, as this was only available in about half of the countries we looked at. To give you an idea, it’s around eight or nine times the cost of the monthly plan in most cases, so you’re getting a few months for free by committing for 12 months. There are exceptions — the annual subscription in Poland is only around five times that of the monthly plan, making it a no-brainer to sign up for the year.

The picture gets more complicated in some instances. For example, you can’t separately sign up for Prime Video in some countries, with Amazon requiring you to get a full Prime membership in order to access the streaming service. Saudi Arabia falls into this category. India does too, although it also has an option called Prime Lite, which is cheaper and includes Prime Video. You can only pay for Prime Lite by the year, and if we had divided this annual cost by 12 to represent the monthly cost of Prime Video in India, it would have been the second cheapest on the list at $0.80 per month.

Aside from workarounds like that, we listed the cheapest monthly plans in each country. There are some places, such as the UK and Mexico, where you can pay a bit more to get an ad-free version of Prime Video.

Should I use a VPN to get Prime Video from another country?

Those familiar with VPNs may have seen the rock-bottom prices in other countries and wondered if they can game the system.

Amongst many great perks, a VPN can spoof your location and make it appear as if you’re in a different city or country. This can allow you to get around geo-restricted content in some cases. Indeed, we had to use a VPN to find out the cost of Prime Video in each nation, and you might be considering taking it one step further and trying to sign up. We would advise against it, and it may not be that simple in any case.

Were you to give it a go, we suspect you’d get as far as the online checkout. Amazon almost certainly requires you to use an address and payment method based in the country you’re representing yourself as accessing the service from. The address might be easy enough, but a foreign bank might raise suspicion, and it’s unlikely you have a payment source in that country.

Aside from running the risk of committing some sort of fraud in this type of plan, you’re also likely to be in violation of the Prime Video terms of service. You wouldn’t be the first person to try this scheme, and Amazon will be constantly trying to root out VPN users trying to save money. As and when you’re discovered, you’ll lose your membership as a minimum. It’s not worth all this risk and hassle to save a few bucks a month.

Why is Prime Video cheaper in some countries and more expensive in others?

Before we get into the market forces at play, we’ll acknowledge that converting all of the prices into US dollars impacts this survey. It helps us make a comparison, but exchange rates are dynamic, and the global economy has been more than a little turbulent over the past decade. If a currency falls sharply against the dollar then it’ll move up in the table, which would look different if we conduct this experiment in another six months or a year.

This is particularly stark when a country is experiencing extremely high inflation, as Argentina has in recent years. It’s still one of the cheapest countries on the list, despite Amazon hiking the cost of Prime Video there in recent months, but it certainly isn’t getting any cheaper for Argentinians.

More objectively, Amazon would probably point to the difference in content on the service in each part of the world. Since a lot of the movies and shows on Prime Video are produced for a western, English-speaking audience, it’s no surprise to see America as the most expensive country. But there are other factors at play.

At the end of the day, a big reason for price differences will be the costs to Amazon and the profit it wants to make. Related to the above point, it costs more to run Prime Video in some countries than others, including paying to license certain content. Then there’s the consumer spending power to consider and the revenue Amazon’s finance experts think can be extracted from each market. Business is business, and Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world for a reason.

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