I have mostly never been a Prime member. I rarely order from Amazon as well (thought I did a fair bit during covid to be honest.) In my case, every time I am considering ordering something, they make some silly offer. Either a week for $0.99 or a month for $5 or something. I usually join at the discount, get the faster shipping and whatever other deal I might want, and then IMMEDIATELY go set it to auto-terminate at the end of the discount term. You’d think their systems would learn that always do this, but they still always seem to keep offering me a deal right when I [occasionally] need it. It also usually always works out cheaper than the shipping would be without Prime… so it feels basically free to me when I do this.
I had a business account at a previous employer. They kept pushing Prime on me, then, when it was active, they would contact me and tell me that I couldn’t have Prime, because it was a business account, it would get cancelled and a few weeks later, they’d offer another free trial…
Since then we also have Prime for Business in Germany, although we don’t use it.
We do the same thing. Were long time Prime members, but they kept jacking the price up. Didn’t like where the company was going, didn’t really use Prime Video often (was a crap Apple TV app anyways), lots of cheap garbage in the store anyways. Many items were 3rd party and didn’t get fast shipping anyways. We still make purchases, but it’s not automatic. We group things if we can and do 1 order (over $35 for the free shipping) once a month or every other month. they do offer the .99 for a month and I’ll get it and cancel. I am pretty ticked many items are priced differently for Prime members though. That feels like a new thing. I did create a secondary account so I’m on my mom’s Amazon family just so we can watch Thursday Night Football.