I’m an Amazon Prime customer, because it looked like a no-brainer for a household that buys quite a lot of stuff online. But now the cost of Prime has suddenly gone up from £49/year to £79.

That’s a huge hike. To conceal it, Amazon tells me that my Prime subscription will now include a subscription to Lovefilm. Big deal! I watch very few movies and have never contemplated subscribing either to Lovefilm or Netflix. A subscription to Lovefilm is completely useless to me.

So the question is: will I stick with Prime at £79?

Answer: maybe — for now. But it’s clear that this is part of a bigger strategy: capture->lock-in->exploit. Or, as the always-perceptive Jason Calcanis puts it:

Does anyone know the actually number of @amazon prime subscribers? Can anyone with Prime imagine life without it? Would you cancel Prime over the $20 a year increase?

Note: Amazon is starting to boil us frogs. Prime goes up 25% and none of us notice. Up another $25 in two years–no one will notice. Eventually it will be $20 a month and have 100m subscribers.

Amazon says it has at least 20M prime subscribers as of Jan ’14, according to [Macquarie] (http://launch.co/story/amazon-prime-has-20m-subs-macquarie-analyst-ben-schachter-reportedly-confirme)