Amazon is asking its U.S. Prime Video subscribers to pay significantly more for an ad-free experience, but it is sweetening the deal with a handful of new perks. The company has rebranded its ad-free add-on as Prime Video Ultra, raising the price from $2.99 to $4.99 per month and bundling in expanded streaming and download capabilities. The change, confirmed in an official Amazon announcement in April 2025, marks the first price increase for ad-free Prime Video since ads were introduced just over a year ago.
What Prime Video Ultra includes
The rebrand is not just a name change. Prime Video Ultra raises the concurrent streaming limit from three devices to five and increases the offline download cap to 100 titles, a substantial jump from the previous allowance. Both upgrades are aimed squarely at households where multiple family members watch on separate screens and at travelers who load up tablets and phones before flights or road trips.
Pricing breaks down as follows: $4.99 per month on a rolling basis, or $45.99 per year for Prime members who already pay for their membership annually. The yearly rate works out to roughly $3.83 per month, a discount over the monthly option but still above the old $2.99 flat rate. These prices sit on top of the base Prime membership, which currently costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year.
That means a Prime member paying annually for both the membership and Ultra would spend about $184.99 per year for ad-free streaming with the expanded features, before accounting for any other Amazon services bundled into Prime.
How the price increase stacks up
The jump from $2.99 to $4.99 per month represents a roughly 67 percent increase in the cost of ad-free viewing. To put that in context, the ad-free add-on has existed for barely more than a year. Amazon first introduced ads into Prime Video content on Jan. 29, 2024, according to reporting from the Associated Press, which described the company’s email to subscribers outlining the change. At that time, the $2.99 monthly fee was the only way to keep commercials off the screen. The Wall Street Journal had earlier detailed Amazon’s plans to build an ad-supported tier, reporting that the company would introduce advertising into Prime Video unless subscribers paid extra.
Compared to rival services, Ultra’s add-on price is relatively modest, though the comparison requires some nuance. Netflix’s Premium plan, which includes four simultaneous streams and 4K resolution, costs $22.99 per month as a standalone subscription. Disney+ Premium, with ad-free viewing and four concurrent streams, runs $17.99 per month without a bundle. Max’s ad-free tier starts at $16.99 per month. None of those prices require a separate base membership the way Prime Video does, so the total cost of Prime plus Ultra is the more honest number for side-by-side comparisons. Still, at roughly $15.40 per month combined (using annual rates for both Prime and Ultra), Amazon’s ad-free package remains cheaper than most competitors’ top tiers.
What Amazon has not explained
Amazon has not disclosed how many subscribers opted for the original $2.99 ad-free plan during its first year, making it difficult to gauge how the price increase will land. Without adoption figures, there is no reliable way to predict whether a meaningful number of viewers will drop back to the ad-supported tier or simply absorb the higher cost.
The company also has not clarified what happens to existing $2.99 subscribers. Whether they will be automatically migrated to Ultra at the new price, given a grace period, or required to actively opt in remains unaddressed in Amazon’s public materials as of May 2026. That is a significant gap for the millions of Prime members trying to understand what their next billing cycle will look like.
There is also no public data on how the 2024 introduction of ads affected viewer behavior or engagement. Several outlets covered the initial rollout and highlighted user frustration over commercials appearing in content that had previously been ad-free, but no churn figures or retention metrics sourced from Amazon have been published. Any claims about subscriber losses or gains during the ad-supported period remain speculative.
The timing of the rebrand raises its own questions. Amazon operated with the $2.99 add-on for roughly a year before bundling additional features into a higher-priced tier. Whether the delay reflects internal product development timelines, competitive pressure, or a response to subscriber feedback is not addressed in any available documentation.
Who benefits and who does not
For a single viewer who rarely watches on more than one device and does not download content for offline use, the added Ultra perks may not justify the price bump. The core value of the old $2.99 plan was simple: no ads. That same viewer now pays 67 percent more for the same ad-free experience, plus features they may never touch. In that scenario, accepting ads and pocketing the savings is a reasonable call.
Larger households tell a different story. A family of four or five, each with their own device, will immediately feel the benefit of five concurrent streams. Frequent travelers who previously hit the download ceiling will appreciate the expanded cap. And for anyone who finds mid-show commercials genuinely disruptive, the ad-free experience remains the primary draw regardless of the extras.
The most practical first step for current Prime members is to check their existing Prime Video subscription settings to see whether they are on the ad-supported plan or the previous ad-free tier, and to review the Ultra pricing that applies to their billing cycle. From there, the decision comes down to a straightforward trade-off: a steeper monthly cost in exchange for a more flexible, commercial-free viewing experience that will feel essential to some households and unnecessary to others.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
