The only surprise in Amazon’s reveal of Alexa+ this week was the price. With inflation rampant and many more impactful subscription services to choose from, $20 per month is an absolutely bonkers price for an as-yet unproven AI chatbot.
Recall that Alexa has historically not cost anything as long as you’ve had hardware to run it. The same goes for Google Assistant (and now the basic version of Gemini) as well as Apple’s Siri. They’ve always been tools to enhance hardware, not the product itself.
What’s stranger is that $20 per month, which I will reiterate is bonkers, is essentially fake — the equivalent of an inflated MSRP. And the reason I know that is because a whole-ass subscription to Prime costs $5 a month less, and includes Alexa+. You can read this one of two ways. Amazon thinks Alexa+ is worth more on its own than the entirety of Prime. Or, the ridiculous pricing is an artificial speedbump to steer people into Amazon’s ecosystem while also encouraging them to buy some Echo hardware while they’re at it. Somehow a company accused in the US and Europe of deceptively separating customers from their money hasn’t tried this trick yet.
In a vacuum, $20 for Alexa+ does line up with some other premium AI services — OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus and the Google One Gemini Advanced plan both cost the same. And Amazon is doing something at least a little different by letting a generative AI voice assistant loose on your smart home, just as it did with the original Alexa. And I do find the option to build a library of uploaded documents within Alexa+’s memory intriguing, much as I’d prefer anyone but Amazon be the one storing that info. But despite some potentially useful features, it’s impossible to recommend spending that kind of money on Alexa+ now, given that Amazon predictably flubbed some demos in its presentation and hardly let any journalists at its event really test it out.
I don’t think Amazon is expecting a ton of sign-ups at that $20 monthly price. Besides prodding more people to sign up for Prime, this wild price for Alexa+ telegraphs a move to jack up the cost of Prime sooner than later. It’s been just over two years since Amazon increased Prime’s price, so we’re certainly due for another gouging.
Of course, the company will point to Prime’s “increased value” over that time, and to be fair you do get a lot your dollar at this point — assuming that you want to continue spending more cash at Amazon. And Alexa+, with its…