If you take advantage of Prime free shipping benefits as an invitee of someone with a Prime subscription, you’re officially on notice: Amazon is shuttering the program, and soon. The company is reaching out to affected customers to confirm the changes: On Oct. 1, 2025, the Invitee program will end, and with it, your ability to order things on Amazon and get them shipped to you for free.
The Prime Invitee Program was an option for Prime subscribers to share their free shipping benefits with a limited number of standard Amazon account holders. It didn’t include other Prime benefits, like Prime Video, but participating Amazon users could still take advantage of Prime’s key perk without needing to pay for the full subscription.
How to keep your free shipping benefits once the Prime Invitee program ends
If you’ve been enjoying free shipping on another Prime account holder’s dime, your Amazon account will go back to basics starting next month. However, Amazon is offering two workarounds for affected users.
Amazon Family
First, you have the option to join the Prime subscriber’s account as part of Amazon Family. The program lets Prime member share their benefits with one other adult outside their household—i.e. the address where the paying account owner lives. This mirrors the metric services like Netflix and HBO Max are using for identifying who can access a given account.
If a Prime owner wants to share their benefits with Amazon users outside of their household, they will only have the option to choose one adult going forward. The plan also allows for up to four teens (whose accounts were added before April 7, 2025), as well as up to four profiles for children.
Amazon Family includes more benefits than the Invitee program—in addition to free delivery, you get Prime Video with ads, Prime Reading, third-party benefits like Grubhub, audio books, e-books, certain games, and Amazon Music.
A discount on your first year of Prime
If the Prime member chooses another adult over you, you still have a second option to avoid paying for a full Prime subscription. Amazon is offering Invitee members a discounted Prime membership for $14.99 for one year. According to the email, you can sign up for the reduced subscription between Sept. 5 and Dec. 31 (the offer currently isn’t live, but presumably you’ll need to use a unique link or have been previously invited to get the discount). Once that year is up, you’ll be on the hook for the full cost of the membership. As of this article, that’s $14.99 per month, or $139 per year, but by this time next year, the rates could be higher.
Does this change affect shared logins?
Some users who shared Prime benefits may not actually have their own Amazon accounts; rather, they share one login with Prime subscriber. This comes with the inconvenience of mixing order histories and payment methods, but it is a simple way to share a Prime subscription.
At the moment, it doesn’t seem like Amazon is putting any kind of restrictions on this type of shared activity: After Oct. 1, you should still be able to log in to another user’s Amazon account and use their Prime benefits, so long as you’re okay sharing the account itself. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon tackle this login sharing in the future, though it could be tricky—unlike something like Netflix, people frequently tend to shop outside of their household, so keeping tabs on shared logins might not be as easy as blocking unknown IP addresses from new devices.
