Amazon Prime has been around for nearly 20 years now, offering a wide variety of benefits to shoppers all over the globe. While many buyers can get by just fine without it, over 200 million people have found themselves making use of the service in their day-to-day lives. Even if you’ve been subscribed for years, there are likely many perks of your Amazon Prime membership you don’t know about. Not only that, a lot of the services you do use might not be living up to their full potential.

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While there are plenty of stores with their own Amazon Prime alternatives with free shipping and other bonus perks, few of them offer the same range of benefits that Amazon does. While not every benefit is relevant for every customer, there are some that could be very useful if you haven’t looked at them before. It’s not a bad idea taking a closer look at everything included with Amazon Prime, especially if some of its bonuses are worthwhile to you — or to someone you know.

You’re probably already familiar with how Prime offers free shipping on its orders, but this is something available to every Amazon buyer, not just those with a membership. Where Prime makes a difference is with speed, as it allows you to get items within two days, and possibly even the very same day you order. This is one of the biggest reasons why Prime is an Amazon feature that entirely changes the way you shop online, as you don’t have to plan ahead to account for longer shipping times.

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Of course, though, this benefit can vary depending on multiple factors, including where you live and what specific item you’ve purchased. While you probably can’t expect everything to show up immediately, it’s not impossible to get items early without a Prime membership, and free shipping is common enough on its own if you order in bulk. In other words, one of the biggest reasons to get Prime might be entirely irrelevant if you live in a big city or close to an Amazon warehouse.

One feature that’s unique to Prime members is the ability to customize your deliveries. With a membership, you’re able to give more instructions to the company as it delivers your package, including the opportunity to have them deliver it inside your garage. You can also pick a specific “Amazon Day” each week for when you want your items delivered, making sure you get everything at once. For anyone living in a dangerous area or with a busy schedule, this is probably the biggest reason for you to have a Prime membership of your own.

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Even this extra feature might be subject to outside circumstances. For example, garage delivery isn’t an option if you don’t have a garage, and it requires smart technology to work. Similary, Amazon Day only applies to eligible items, so if something is going to take a particularly long time to arrive no matter what, you might not get it at the same time as everything else.

Separate from the aforementioned Amazon Day, Prime members can also take advantage of Prime Day. There are two major shopping events – one in July (Amazon Prime Day) and the other in October (Prime Big Deal Days). In both, customers with a membership gain access to exclusive discounts on popular items, allowing buyers to save money during these days. Access to these discounts is only available to those with an active Prime membership.

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While not everything on the website is discounted during Prime Day, you’ll probably be able to find something you could use anyway. We recently detailed the best deals on our favorite tech for October Prime Day 2024, which included extremely popular monitors and headphones. It’s worth keeping an eye on if you’re a long-time subscriber, especially considering how the October date didn’t even exist until 2022. More changes — and possibly more Prime Days — could come around in the future, which should let you get a bit more value out of your account when they arrive.

Amazon Prime doesn’t just provide benefits for those willing to spend more money. It also grants access to a large library of media, including videos, books, music, and games. These all come with unique benefits for members, with Prime Video showcasing Amazon-original shows, Prime Gaming offering special in-game rewards, and Amazon Music giving Prime customers a discount on its “unlimited” subscription. You might not be using any of these services as often as you could be, especially if you haven’t kept up-to-date with their latest offerings.

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These perks do come with some limitations. Back in 2023, Amazon Prime Video Streaming started getting ads, requiring an additional cost for an ad-free experience. A lot of titles offered by Prime Gaming are also only available for a limited time, meaning you’ll lose out on anything there if you neglect to claim it. These services are mostly helpful for long-term members rather than those dipping into a Prime subscription for one month at a time.

Unlike the aforementioned services, Amazon Kids+ is meant for the children of Amazon account holders rather than the account holders themselves. This service consists of ad-free content including educational shows and family-friendly video games. It syncs up with specially designed devices (like the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro tablet) so you don’t have to bother learning how to kid-proof an Amazon Fire tablet yourself. It even categorizes content by age groups, making it useful until your child reaches their teenage years.

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Unfortunately, you can’t get Kids+ completely free even if you have a Prime account. But with a membership, you’re able to get a discount, reducing the cost by around $30 for an annual subscription. The kid-friendly content is also somewhat difficult to navigate, and it’s not a major help if you already have an existing service like YouTube Kids. Still, if Amazon is pretty much your primary website, your family can get a lot of use out of this service.

While Prime offers a lot of content from Amazon itself, it also enhances how you manage the content you already own. Amazon Photos offers Prime members the chance to store just about every photo they’ve ever taken, as well as an extra 5 GB of videos. This cloud-based storage allows you to access images across multiple devices and at any time, with extra storage options being available at a few extra dollars a month. Even if you don’t have a Prime subscription, you’ll still have a baseline of 5 GB available for both photos and videos.

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You should keep in mind that there’s a big caveat with Amazon Prime Photos’ unlimited storage. If you ever leave Amazon Prime and go over your storage quota, or you let your account sit for two years, the company will start automatically deleting whatever you uploaded. This might not be relevant for those who use Amazon every single day, but it could be something you easily forget about after a long enough period. For that reason, you shouldn’t use Amazon Photos as the primary storage location for anything that you can’t live without.

Even though it isn’t free to members, Amazon One Medical is a service that isn’t easy to access without a Prime subscription. This service includes a wide plethora of medical benefits including on-demand health care and prescription renewal, all lasting as long as you’re subscribed. Non-Prime members can at least take advantage of a pay-per-visit option or an annual subscription purchased outside of Amazon. But these are extremely expensive, with the annual subscription costing twice as much as a Prime member’s.

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Prime members also get access to extra benefits like RxPass, offering all the medication you need for just $5 a month. Some might question how well Amazon can provide this sort of health care, especially considering how it discontinued Halo devices as its controversial health business struggled last year. But if you don’t have easy access to any sort of medical alternative, Amazon’s health care is at least a decent option with a Prime membership.

Amazon might be more useful for those who are stuck at home, but customers who constantly drive for in-person shopping can still make use of Prime benefits. With the help of select partners like bp and Amoco, you can use your subscription to save money on every gallon of gas you pump from these companies. It actually works by linking to another app, earnify, and combining its own discount, leading to a total of 10 cents saved on each gallon. This isn’t a particularly massive discount, but if you own a massive gas-guzzler of a vehicle, the membership might end up paying for itself in the long run.

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As mentioned, you get this sort of benefit at very specific gas stations, so you might not always be able to make use of it. You can only use this deal by linking to earnify, so you won’t get any discount without it — even if you have a Prime membership. Luckily, the app itself doesn’t cost a dime, and it also gives you some extra bonuses you can use at gas stations for further savings. It’s nothing but a win-win if you don’t mind having to manage multiple accounts at once.

There are plenty of other services partnered with Amazon to provide savings beyond fuel. Grubhub is one such service, offering Grubhub+ for free to Prime members. This allows you to get discounts on food from select locations and avoid delivery fees entirely, with advertised average savings of around $300. If delivery benefits happen to be one of your biggest reasons for having a Prime subscription, the extra savings from Grubhub+ might be particularly appealing, too.

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Quite a few other Amazon-owned companies take advantage of a membership as well. Many Prime shipping benefits can be used on Woot!, an alternative online store focused on special discounts. Those making use of Prime Gaming can also get a free subscription to a Twitch channel, which is especially helpful if that channel utilizes Twitch subscriber-only streams. Pretty much every company owned by Amazon will give you some sort of bonus with a Prime membership, so it might be worth looking into a subscription even if you don’t use Amazon itself all that often.

Even with all of these benefits, it’s possible that none of them are all that appealing to you specifically. If that’s the case, you still have the option of sharing these benefits with your friends or family by taking advantage of Amazon Households. These will allow two adults to link their accounts, granting both of them access to all the Prime bonuses while only one actually has to pay. Teenager accounts can also access Prime’s digital content, including Prime Video and Amazon Music, further extending the value of a subscription.

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You’ll probably want to make sure these benefits are only shared with people you trust. There also isn’t very much preventing you from simply sharing a single account since you can add payment methods and addresses without many restrictions, so using Households is mostly just a precaution. Still, if you want to be especially careful with your own personal account, it’s a fine way to take advantage of Amazon’s benefits at a reduced cost. Even if you don’t need everything offered by Prime, if you have the money to spare, you can at least help out someone who can actually make use of it all.