This past week, Amazon introduced Alexa Plus, a new incarnation of its virtual assistant that’s all ready for 2025, equipped with exactly the sort of large language models (LLMs) and agentic capabilities that it needs to compete against the likes of Google Gemini. I got to check out all of Amazon’s Alexa Plus demos at its launch event, and while Alexa’s still capable of mishearing you and forcing you to repeat yourself or rephrase things, it’s honestly a pretty impressive upgrade, tying together a lot of smart home, entertainment, and assistant features in a way that I think is going to be extremely appealing to a lot of people.

And you absolutely should not subscribe to it.

Don’t get me wrong: Alexa Plus looks like it’s definitely worth using. The problem doesn’t lie with the service’s functionality, but with how Amazon is trying to sell it. The idea of charging users for access to advanced AI tools is hardly new — OpenAI has millions of paying customers, and Google offers some compelling reasons to upgrade to Gemini Advanced. So far Alexa has been free to use, and I get the sense that Amazon doesn’t quite know what to do now that it thinks Alexa Plus is worth paying for.

Let’s start by looking at what you stand to get from Alexa Plus. Amazon wants to upgrade your experience controlling your smart home, discovering and consuming media, and accessing information with the help of some powerful agentic AI assistants. Alexa Plus leans on a whole lot of different models in order to do that, adding complexity and cost on Amazon’s end. What the company’s trying to achieve here feels very similar to what Google’s doing with Gemini extensions — only, rather than augmenting its existing offering like Google, Amazon went back and pretty much redesigned Alexa from the ground up.

There’s also a lot of overlap between Gemini efforts like Project Astra and Project Mariner with Alexa Plus capabilities, from suggesting recipes to interacting with websites on your behalf. But while Amazon’s locking these behind Alexa Plus, Gemini’s free tier has been a much more fluid boundary — although lots of Google’s experiments start off as limited tests, and maybe later arrive as paid Gemini Advanced premiums, we’re already seeing many trickle down and become adopted as general Gemini features, available to all for free.

All this just serves to make it incredibly difficult for an end user to assign a monetary value to Alexa Plus: What is this service actually worth?

To hear Amazon’s company line, it’s worth $20 a month. But I think that number is a phantom, just utterly fantastical.

After all, Amazon intends to make Alexa Plus available to its hundreds of millions of Amazon Prime subscribers without charging them a penny more. And while you can subscribe to Prime in a lot of different ways, saving money with annual or student plans, for comparison purposes, Prime’s normal rate is basically $15 a month.

So, $15 for Prime gets you Alexa Plus, speedy delivery of your Amazon orders, Prime Video, Amazon Music, Twitch stuff, e-book stuff, Grubhub stuff… it’s a lot.

Or you could pay $20 for only Alexa Plus. But you wouldn’t because you’re not an idiot, and you understand that paying less for more is better than paying more for less.

Rather than jumping right to speculation, I reached back out to Amazon, hoping to expand my understanding of this pricing structure. Surely, the company must have some sort of demographic it’s targeting with that Alexa-Plus-only $20/month rate? After all, the number came from somewhere. But when plainly asking, “Who is this intended for,” the response I received from Amazon contained absolutely nothing to illuminate the issue. Whatever the actual answer is, the company is refusing through its silence to publicly state it.

Could this be a situation where Alexa Plus is not intended to remain a Prime freebie, and Amazon eventually plans to make the $20 subscription the only way to access it? Nothing Amazon has said, at its launch event nor in subsequent statements, offers anything even hinting at that outcome. Or could we take this as a bad omen for Amazon raising its Prime subscription price for everyone, in the name of free AI features? Oof, I hope not.

Is this just some attempt to quantify the worth of Alexa Plus in order to make Prime itself suddenly appear much more valuable? And maybe drive a few more Prime subscriptions in the process? While a bit cynical, there’s certainly logic there, and the better Amazon can communicate that point, the easier that job is going to be.

Making this all the more confounding, when you look at the sort of things Amazon expects users to do with Alexa Plus, the service becomes enormously less useful the less you’re tied into the rest of Amazon’s services. If you’re not getting Alexa Plus through Prime, you’re not going to have Amazon Music and Prime Video content for its agents to share with you, and you’re probably going to feel a lot less motivated to be setting up grocery orders through Amazon Fresh.

Alexa Plus is clearly designed for users who are deeply enmeshed in Amazon’s ecosystem and is more powerful and useful as a consequence of that decision. It makes perfect sense for it to be connected at the hip to Prime. And positively none at all to be a stand-alone product — that’s somehow still more expensive.