For the first time since its inception, Amazon has hiked the cost of its Prime subscription for all customers.

Amazon Prime now costs $99/year, according to an announcement from the online retailer Thursday morning. Prime was previously priced at $79/year.

The new price will take effect for all customers when their Prime account next renews. For example, if your Prime account doesn’t renew until December, you won’t pay the new price until then.

In a statement sent out to subscribers this morning Amazon said, “Even as fuel and transportation costs have increased, the price of Prime has remained the same for nine years. Since 2005, the number of items eligible for unlimited free Two-Day Shipping has grown from one million to over 20 million. We also added unlimited access to over 40,000 movies and TV episodes with Prime Instant Video and a selection of over 500,000 books to borrow from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.”

The best feature of Amazon Prime is its free two-day shipping on nearly anything you’d like to purchase. Prime Instant Video and the Lending Library are nice bonuses, but the catalogs lack depth and thus cannot be used on too regular a basis, in most cases. From a Hypable perspective, the best things we can say about Instant Video and Lending Library is that the former includes Downton Abbey (which Netflix doesn’t) and the latter offers Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.

While coupons are not available to save money on the service, Prime does let you share one subscription with “up to four household members,” which is a nice benefit for those who are looking for ways to use it at a cheaper cost. In our experience, we’ve noticed the “household” members don’t need to be sharing the same address.

Amazon also announced today that the Prime Student accounts are now priced at $49/year (previously $39/year).