Amazon’s Prime membership has been one of the most useful subscription services available in India, providing access to a music streaming app, an entertainment application and giving benefits to the Amazon shopping application.
Most, if not all of our readers, are probably using Amazon’s application for one need or the other, be it Prime Video for content consumption or just the Amazon application to purchase goods.
The subscription plan has been fairly cheap, at least in comparison to the likes of Netflix, offering different durations as well. The base duration of one month has been quite useful, but it will no longer be on offer.
The company will be offering either a three-month or annual Prime membership. Why did the company remove the one month plan? Find out by reading ahead.
Amazon To Remove One Month Plan, Free Trials Discontinued Too
Amazon has revealed that it would no longer be offering a monthly membership plan due to the new Reserve Bank of India mandate. For those of you unaware, the one month plan was quite cheaply priced, with the cost being a measly Rs 129 per month.
The new guidelines from RBI ask banks and financial institutions to bring an additional factor of authentication for processing recurring online transactions, with the deadline for the same set for September 30.
Amazon, as of the time of writing this article, has updated its support page to showcase the removal of the monthly membership plan for Amazon Prime. To add to this, the company has also temporarily discontinued free trials since April 27.
As of now, if a user wishes to join Prime, they can either purchase the three-month subscription, priced at Rs 329 or get the annual plan, priced at Rs 999.
The new RBI framework, which was originally announced back in August of 2019, has been extended to September 30 of 2021. This deadline was extended to avoid any inconvenience to the user.
In the beginning, RBI had issued the framework to roll out AFA for recurring transactions of up to Rs 2,000 in 2019 but later extended that rule to transactions of up to a limit of Rs 5,000 per transactions. Any transactions above the amount would require an OTP.
It will be interesting to see whether the overall subscriptions for Amazon Prime take a hit due to the removal of the monthly plan since some users might have subscribed for a short duration, be it for lack of use or for any other reason.
