Amazon Prime Video Ad Free Is Dead — Hello Prime Video Ultra and a Price Hike

Amazon dropped some news on Friday the 13th that felt appropriately ominous for a lot of subscribers. On March 13, 2026, Prime Video began emailing Ad Free subscribers to let them know their current plan is going away. Come April 10, Prime Video Ad Free becomes Prime Video Ultra, and it's not exactly a like-for-like swap.

The price goes up. Certain features get locked away. And if you're a standard Prime member who's been quietly enjoying 4K streams without paying extra, that's about to end.

What Is Prime Video Ultra?

The new Ultra tier sits at $4.99 per month, which is a $2 jump from the old Ad Free price of $2.99. Annually, Amazon's offering a plan at $45.99, which works out to roughly a 23% saving over paying monthly.

Here's what Ultra gets you:

• Ad-free viewing (on-demand content)
• 4K/UHD and Dolby Atmos audio
• Up to five concurrent streams (up from three)
• Up to 100 downloads for offline viewing (up from 25)

That concurrent streams bump is genuinely useful for bigger households, and 100 downloads is a solid improvement. But the 4K lockdown? That one stings.

What Standard Prime Members Lose

Basic Prime subscribers aren't walking away empty-handed. Amazon confirmed the free tier is still getting a few improvements, including Dolby Vision support and offline downloads increasing from 25 to 50. Concurrent streams also go from three to four.

But ads stay. And 4K goes behind the paywall.

So if you're a Prime member who's been watching in UHD without paying for Ad Free, that access disappears on April 10 unless you upgrade. Amazon's statement on the matter was about as corporate as you'd expect, saying "delivering ad-free streaming with premium features requires significant investment, and this structure aligns with other major streaming services while ensuring customers have the flexibility to choose how they want to watch."

Flexibility. Right.

What About Existing Ad Free Subscribers?

If you're already paying for Ad Free at $4.99... wait, no. The old price was $2.99. If you were already subscribed at $2.99, your plan automatically transitions to Ultra on April 10 and you gain the new features without doing anything. Your price, however, jumps to $4.99 from that point forward.

Worth noting: live sports, live TV events, and certain ad-supported content will still include ads even on Ultra. That's unchanged from the old Ad Free terms and is buried in the fine print, so keep that in mind if NFL or NBA streams were part of the appeal.

The Bigger Picture

This is Amazon running the same play Netflix ran between 2022 and 2024. Introduce an ad-supported base tier, let it settle, then start tiering up the premium experience and raising prices accordingly. CNBC reported that Prime Video's ad-supported average audience hit 315 million globally, and Amazon's advertising revenue grew 22% year over year to $68.6 billion in 2025. The ad business is booming. So naturally, the ad-free option gets more expensive.

Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Sling TV, Apple TV Plus, Netflix, Peacock, and Spotify have all raised prices in the past year. Amazon was perhaps the last major holdout on the ad-free front, and now that gap's closed too.

Prime Video Ultra is currently a US-only rollout. No word yet on when or if other regions will see the same changes.