Free of Amazon Prime
Main reason my household keeps multiple prime account is because I have 2TB+ worth of pictures stored on Amazon drive that was part of Amazon prime’s unlimited photo storage offering.
Prime is $120/year and I paid for extra 1TB for video for $60/year. Although $180/year isn’t much, it didn’t feel good that I couldn’t cut off prime anymore because it holds all my files….almost like hostages.
When wife and I were traveling abroad for 1.5 years, I realized I could have save quite a few dollars if I planned a little better. If I was able to cancel our California health insurance which doesn’t work abroad anyway, car insurance, and Amazon prime, it’s close to $1000/month saving. To be fair, Amazon was like $15/month only, but it’s more symbolic than actual monetary saving.
So foster a plan to rid myself of AWS handcuff. Enter NAS. The plan was to get a NAS with 2 drives with mirror. Then sync all the files from Amazon and cut it off.
I got a Synology DS220+ with 2 Western Digital Red w/ CMR. WD Red hard drive is long term storage specific type of drive. All big hard drive manufacture makes similar offering.
When I got the drive and eager to sync files off Amazon drive, I found out that Amazon has cut off all 3rd party access to Amazon drive. What a bummer. It only allows their own mobile app and desktop sync software. I wasn’t too happy about this, because that basically ruin the whole operation.
But then I found that DS220+ supports virtual machine.
Oh interesting, so maybe I can run Windows VM to sync all the files into NAS. Build-in memory wasn’t enough to run virtual machine, so got a 8GB laptop memory and away we go.
It worked. After couple days, this little NAS running windows 10 VM actually downloaded all my amazon drive. And I just cut off the extra $60/year for 1TB. Will be removing amazon prime soon and had my housemate add me to their account. Then we’ll finally be Amazon Prime free.
Only down side is I over used Comcast’s bandwidth cap and that costed $100 extra for month of October.
Update:
It is done. I’ve officially cut ties with Amazon Prime today(2021–11–30). Amazon did tried hard to pull you back in, but this last screen just made me realized that I buy stuff more than I thought I did. And all other Prime perks are pretty useless to me.
Also, forgot to factor in with Prime membership, I get 5% off with Amazon’s credit card. Without the card, it’s 3% off. Supposedly, I got $214 back from past 12 months of purchase, which is $4280 spent on Amazon. I know Amazon’s trying to show how much money I got back, but I actually feel pretty bad that I spent over that much on Amazon.
So without Prime and same spending, I would lose out $85 worth of cash back. Now, that kinda mess with the equation. If all the spending on Amazon is necessity, then Prime now costed $120 minus $85, which is $35. That would be cheap enough to get it for the free shipping, maybe? But then I look at the spending report, I made some large purchase on behalf of some project which isn’t gonna happen every year. So for now, we’ll leave it the way it is.
