ProtonVPN was killswitching on me 3x a day and NordVPN are criminals (read their ToS it's 2 pages of fuck you we took your money) after you discover they built in a leak feature. PIA is capped at 10mbps. Is there any other decent option out there?
I’ve been a Prime member from the very beginning, but I’m seriously reevaluating whether I should drop it. The value proposition is decreasing for me. At $99 I thought it was pretty good considering the perks like video and music. But then they crippled Prime Music a few months back so it’s a shadow of what it once was (pushing you to subscribe to Unlimited). Now Prime Video is getting ads. Those “extras” are becoming less compelling. So I’m paying $140 annually for just free shipping? Hmmm, these numbers don’t add up anymore.
I cancelled last year. Slower shipping is annoying, but it also encourages me to shop elsewhere, which is nice. I haven't missed Prime Video, and I'm considering cancelling other streaming subscriptions as well (Disney+ and Netflix left, and both raised prices for my ad-free tier).
At current prices, I could probably just buy physical media for nearly everything I care about and come out ahead.
Amazon typically hasn’t been two business days consistently for years for me. I also found out many of their prices are massively inflated for certain products. A lawn mower I was considering was at least 30% more expensive than the same one on a competing website.
This is a disturbing trend. Apparently a lot of these major streaming services are discovering that they can make more from ads than people paying for the service. At least when calculated with the subscriber counts they currently have. It seems they don't anticipate people leaving their services over this.
Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads. I'm not going to pay for a service even if its paid service doesn't have ads if it has a free or cheaper service with ads as that would just be rewarding them for implementing ads.
For example with Amazon's plan here. If you pay this $3.00 to remove ads then you are paying Amazon $3.00 because they added ads. This only increases the amount of ads that will be added to things.
this is why i dumped Hulu. I paid for ad-free and they were still putting ads in 'select' shows? dumped and never looked back. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile.
It’s so frustrating. I pay for YT Premium bc that’s probably what I watch the most of…on my main TV in the living room.
The “sponsored” videos have the content creator do multiple commercial spots in their own videos and it’s so annoying. I don’t mind if they advertise their own stuff, like merch, but it’s everything from cereal to VPN’s to mental health apps. Irritating af.
Looks like I canceled Prime right on time. Literally just did it after having it for years because it no longer provides any meaningful benefit, and it's grossly overpriced for what it is.
When I used to get two-day shipping all the way here in bumfuck, South Dakota, then it was worth it, but it's faster now just to order from some other site.
Fun fact - if you order a bunch of stuff non-prime, the ship time will be like a week and a half or whatever. If you then upgrade to prime (even the free trial), the delivery estimate suddenly recalculates and it’ll be there in 2 days.
It’s artificially slowed, by obscene amounts, to encourage paying for the subscription. Which other sites don’t do.
I haven't received anything in 2 days since early 2020, and what finally made me cancel is they took forever to even ship one of my items that was in stock. I ordered two things, one was shipped by the seller and arrived in 3 or 4 days, the other was from the same seller but shipped by Amazon, and they didn't even initiate shipping until a week later.
I was paying for a service that's objectively worse than the norm.
I think it depends on where you live. I've been without Prime a while and haven't seen the artificial slowdown. It always says it'll take 9 days or something when I order, but most often I get a shipping update the next day and things show up in 2-3 days anyway.
Well that's getting fucking cancelled then. The constant FreeVee ad supported shit was annoying enough, but they can properly fuck off now. Prime is just a vehicle to sell you more shit.
I would pay for Amazon Prime if they offered purely a free 2-day shipping only version, but I refuse to pay for Prime if it supports the media companies, so I don't pay for Prime. I have zero interest in DRM-filled "you will own nothing and be happy" streaming bullshit, and I have negative interest in the same thing with ads. Enshittification at its finest.
Nope, fuck this. Been thinking about canceling Prime for a while now, they just keep raising the price while at the same time all their services get worse year after year.
I canceled mine a year or two ago. Tbh I have not missed it much.
I also did not miss the shipping part as much as I thought I would. If I need to make an order, I wait until I have enough needs to hit the $35 level for free shipping. Even though amazon claims otherwise, I usually end up getting stuff in 2 days just like I used to with Prime.
This has the added benefit of making it less likely for me to be lazy and order a bunch of smaller things. I thus end up getting those things locally.
Streaming was nice while it lasted but these companies have survived looking enough too become the villains they sought to replace. Sad but fuck them and hoist the sails I say.
Guys. This is literally just a price increase for prime video. It sucks, but it is not the same as "prime getting ads". Not saying it's worth keeping, but you are yelling like your only option is to watch ads or cancel