You can pay $19.99 a month for Alexa Plus – but why would you?

Today, we got our first glimpse of the new AI-infused virtual assistant that Amazon‘s engineers have been busily crafting behind the scenes. Alexa Plus, which is rolling out to users in the US over the coming months, can book you a restaurant reservation, manage your schedule, and even show video evidence of your driver walking your dog in the morning. You know, normal, everyday things. And it can do all this for $19.99 per month – or free if you already subscribe to Amazon Prime.

That standalone price is very high, and almost totally arbitrary. After all, an Amazon Prime subscription currently costs $14.99 monthly or $139 per year, so paying more for Alexa Plus alone would make no sense at all. And that’s the point. The fee for Alexa Plus by itself could have been anything because Amazon doesn’t actually expect anyone to buy it that way.

What it does want is for you to think “Well, might as well…” and finally press the button to commit to Prime, or decide to keep your subscription active just to see what the new Alexa Plus experience is like.

The price of ‘free’

What else does Amazon stand to gain from the generous offer of ‘free’ Alexa Plus? Well, according to the company’s Devices and Services event blog, the service “will start rolling out in the US in the next few weeks, and subsequently in waves in the coming months starting with households with Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21.” If you don’t own such a device, the company not-too-subtly suggests that “you can buy one today”. I’m only surprised there’s not a button to add one right to your cart.

It’s not clear whether Alexa Plus will eventually be made available for all existing Echo devices. It looks like all the processing happens server-side and not everything requires a screen, in which case there’s seemingly no reason as to why it wouldn’t be freely available, but from a business perspective it makes a lot more sense to restrict it to the relatively pricey Echo Show series. The humble Amazon Echo might have earned the top spot in our roundup of the best smart speakers, but if that’s all you have at home, you might miss out on the AI action; at least in the short term, anyway.

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There’s also no word on privacy, and how much you might have to sacrifice to get the most out of Alexa Plus. During its launch event, Amazon showed off a wall covered in logos for companies it’s working with to deliver services via AI, and presumably, you’ll have to grant Amazon access to your various accounts for these integrations to work. At this point, we just don’t know, but your data is valuable, so it’s well worth finding out.

Alexa Plus might well prove to be a valuable addition to your home. Justt bear in mind that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that $19.99 tag doesn’t really mean a great deal by itself. If you’re getting something like that ‘free’, then you’re usually paying in other ways.