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Prime Day is almost here, and to make the most of the big sale, you need to be an Amazon Prime member. This typically costs $139 per year or $14.99 per month, and comes with a lot of perks, like faster shipping on many items and access to Prime Video streaming.
Amazon used to let you share all those membership benefits with a limited number of people, but last year the company tightened up the rules, replacing the old system with the Amazon Family program. Now it comes with a lot more restrictions, but there are still ways around them—as long as you’re okay with the drawbacks.
Sharing Prime benefits with Amazon Family
Amazon Family is the existing program for sharing Prime benefits, and it allows you to add separate profiles for one other adult who lives in the same household as the primary account holder, and up to four kids. This grants access to all the standard benefits, such as free delivery, Prime Video with ads, Prime Reading, third-party benefits like Grubhub, and access to audiobooks, e-books, certain games, and Amazon Music.
However, there is still a way to share your Prime benefits with anyone, regardless of whether they live in the same household.
How to share Amazon Prime benefits with anyone
If you want to share benefits with people outside of your household, you still can—with a big caveat. I’ve been using my parents’ Prime account for years, simply by logging in with their email and password. This comes with the inconvenience of mixing order histories and payment methods, but it is a simple way to share a Prime subscription without restrictions—I can use it even while living in a different state, as can my siblings.
The biggest potential issue here is that you will occasionally need to share one-time temporary passwords (OTP) from the primary account holder when you log into a new device (or get logged out for some reason). OTPs can also be required when trying to change certain subscription settings.
To keep things somewhat separated, you can still create separate profiles under the same Amazon Prime login, but you’ll still all have access to the same order history, addresses, payment methods, subscriptions, returns info, etc. As long as you’re cool with that from a privacy standpoint, it’s no hassle, though you will need to pay extra attention—I’ve messed up a few times and sent orders to one of my family members’ homes or used their credit cards, and vice versa.
Given that many people won’t be comfortable with all of the above, it’s no real surprise that Amazon has yet to address this workaround, though that’s no guarantee the company won’t make it harder (or impossible) to share logins this way in the future.
