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When Amazon’s Prime Day starts Monday, July 16 at 12 p.m. Pacific, you’ll need to be a Prime member to partake of the deals. Prime is Amazon’s $119 per year service that provides two-day shipping on all orders, as well as a ton of extras like the Kindle lending library and Prime Video.

Good news, though: You may not need to pay for membership at all if you just want it long enough to take advantage of Amazon’s annual shopping extravaganza. Here are a few ways to get a short-term Prime membership to cash in on the savings.

Editor's note, 7/12/18: We've updated the 'Other avenues for free Amazon Prime' section of this article with information on a 3-month promotion for select American Express cardholders.

Method One: The standard 30-day free trial

If you’ve never tried Amazon Prime or haven’t tried it in a while, you may be eligible for a free, 30-day trial. After the 30 days, Amazon will charge you for the membership—either $13 per month or $119 per year—so don’t forget to cancel before the trial is up.

Figuring out if you’re eligible is simple. Just sign in to your Amazon account and visit the Prime membership landing page. If you see a button that says Start your 30-day free trial, click it to sign up. If the button says Get started, then you’ve been to the well one too many times recently, and you’ll have to wait to get a free trial again.

Method Two: Prime Student 6-month free trial

Amazon has a student program that offers both a free trial that lasts for six months and 50 percent off the regular price for Prime membership. If you’re headed back to college in September, Prime Day could be a great time to gear up for the school year.

To qualify for Prime Student, you need to be enrolled in at least one course in an institution in the United States or Puerto Rico, provide proof of enrollment if requested, and a valid .EDU email address. To get started, go to the Prime Student landing page and click Start your 6-month trial.

After your trial is up, Prime Student costs $6.49 per month or $60 per year. Make sure you mark the end date on your calendar (or just cancel any time after Prime Day), and your membership will continue to the end of the trial period. The Prime Student discounted rate is good for up to four years.

Other avenues for free Amazon Prime

There are other ways to get Prime for free as well, but they’re not as straightforward. You can, for example, open a new account with a different email address, and then try Prime on that new account. Keep in mind, however, that means you have to secure another account containing all your payment information.

If someone in your house is already subscribed to Prime, they can share it with your account. Amazon allows you to share a Prime membership with other members of your household, including one other adult and up to four kids aged 13 to 17. Teen accounts don’t get to share Prime exclusive deals, but the second adult account does. This is only an option for family (or trusted friends), as both adult accounts must agree to share the same payment details.

You can also sign up for Prime and apply for the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa card, which gives you 5 percent cash-back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases. If you’re already buying at least $2,400 per year from Amazon and Whole Foods combined, this is an easy way to have your credit card benefits pay for your Prime membership.

Finally, select American Express cardholders may be eligible for a targeted offer of a 3-month Amazon Prime membership for new subscribers. To find out if you qualify, check your email or log into your Amazon account. (You can read more about this promotion in this Slickdeals thread.)

How to cancel an Amazon Prime free trial

Some of you might love Prime or Prime Student so much that you stick with it to get that free shipping and other perks. But if you’re a hardcore deal hunter who just wants to bail from Prime when the deals are gone, here’s what to do.

The standard way to dump Prime is to hover over your account name in the upper-right corner of any Amazon page, and then select Your Prime Membership from the drop-down menu. You can then cancel on the next page.

An easier way, however, is just to go straight to this Amazon help page and click End Membership. Regardless of how you begin the cancellation process, it’s straightforward—you’re free and clear once you’ve done it.

If you’re thinking about cancelling Amazon Prime, consider this: Never pay for it again, instead.

Image: Shutterstock

Following a year of revelations about Amazon’s treatment of its workers, privacy-infringing products, and huge tax handouts from the government, some people are cancelling their Amazon Prime memberships in protest.

But boycotting one feature of a company that has its feelers in every nook and cranny of your online life isn’t going to do much in the way of actually hurting Amazon. Amazon Web Services is a major backbone of the internet and is all-but-impossible to avoid. A Prime subscription costs $12.99 a month. Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest man in the world and has more money than God. In 2017, Amazon accounted for 44 percent of all US e-commerce sales.

You’ll never put a dent in Amazon’s profit by canceling Prime. It’s way more fun—and arguably, more effective—to be grit in the gears. That’s why I plan to never pay for Prime, and use free trials forever, instead.

I’ve been doing this for years, and on the way to perfecting this grift, I’ve fucked up once or twice, so you can learn from my mistakes.

Step 1: Open a new email account
You’ve likely already used your everyday email address on a Prime trial in the past, which means you can’t use it again to get a new free trial. Open your favorite email service—Yahoo, AOL, MSN—and start a new address. I avoid making Gmail burners because I used Google products for a lot of stuff and this could get confusing. Just don’t use one of those fake email address services (like Email Fake or Guerrilla Mail) that don’t actually give you access to a secure inbox, because you’ll actually need to use this inbox to confirm your trial and check on order updates.

Note: Most email providers will put a limit on the number of accounts you can open with the same phone number. Since you’re going to be connecting this email and eventual Amazon account to your credit card details, you’re probably going to want to enable two-factor authentication as well. If you want to be extra-secure, you could buy a cheap prepaid phone and use that number for receiving 2fa text codes.

When you hit a ceiling, move on to the next email client. There are hundreds out there. One day, if I live to be hundreds of years old, I will run out of email clients. But that’s like thinking about the heat-death of the universe: I don’t.

Step 2: Get a password manager
This is a crucial part of the game. Do not skip it. Please take it from me—you will want an easy way to keep these logins straight, once you’ve made a couple dozen of them. Not only will you need to remember the login credentials for your Amazon account, but all the burner email accounts, too.

Read more: This Is the Best Amazon Black Friday Deal, Ever

Use Lastpass or your preferred password manager, if you don’t already have one. Using a password manager will also help make your online life more generally secure.

Step 3: Start your trial
Log out of whatever Amazon account you’re already in and start a new one with the email address you just made. From there, hit Try Prime, anywhere on the site. You’ll be able to find it, it’s fucking everywhere and never leaves you alone. Go ahead and “try” Prime.

It’ll ask you to add your credit card, but that’s fine. We’re going to make sure Amazon will never charge it for Prime in a moment.

At the moment, Amazon doesn’t seem to be strictly enforcing rules about how many free trials one person can sign up for. Some people in this Reddit thread have reported that Amazon put a stop to their trials after around 30 signups. Amazon Prime’s terms and conditions do not say that you can’t keep stacking free trials, though it does say that the company “may terminate your Prime membership at our discretion without notice.”

I emailed Amazon to ask if, or how, they monitor new Prime accounts, and will update if I hear back.

Step 4: End your trial
It’s time to curve Jeff Bezos. Immediately after starting the trial, navigate straight to ending it.

To do this, go to Your Account in the top bar, then Prime. It might take a moment to activate your trial—there's a very slight lag from when you sign up to when these options come available—but then you’ll see a breakdown of your membership on the left sidebar. Near the bottom, there will be a link that says “End Trial and Benefits” or “Remind me before renewing.” Remember, you probably won’t be checking whatever email address you signed up with, so you want to end it, not be reminded.

Read more:The Motherboard Guide to Amazon Prime Day's Best Deals

From here you’ll be led through the most devious user experience path I’ve seen. Step carefully, and keep clicking “Cancel My Benefits,” even as the site tries to get you to stay.

After a few attempts to keep you, you’ll reach a page to cancel. In tiny print, you’ll see that this option ends your membership at the end of one month, and you’re free to use the trial benefits until then.

I learned my lesson about not immediately canceling the hard way once. I forgot to end a trial and saw that I was being charged by Amazon for a membership for months without realizing—and had no clue which email address was guilty. I had to log in to each Amazon account and email inbox (almost all of which I’d forgotten the passwords to, because I wasn’t using Lastpass yet), to try to find the culprit and cancel the subscription. Don’t be like me, I want you to avoid this mistake.

Step 5: Live your life

You’re free to use all the benefits of Prime for the next 30 days, no charge. Sometimes I put a reminder on my calendar when it’s ending, so I know when to renew if I need to. But because you’ve ended the trial just as it began, it’s not necessary to remind yourself, and in fact, the site will keep reminding you that your benefits are ending every time you log in. You also obviously don’t have to repeat this process every 30 days on the dot—you can make a new one whenever you need.

Bonus step: Look inward

Do a little introspection about how often you use Amazon Prime for dumb small shit that you could grab at a small local shop. Someday, Amazon will probably change how it verifies new accounts. Maybe today is that day. Until then, you can live fast and die with free shipping.

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