Is Amazon gearing up for a Prime VPN launch?

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(Image credit: Amazon)

Amazon may be planning a major move into more software fields after it announced two new subscription offers for users of its popular Eero home mesh networking Wi-Fi system. 

Eero Secure and Eero Secure+ follow a path well treaded by others usch as Invizbox, Bitdefender or Norton Core or Cujo. In a nutshell, take a layer of hardware and add privacy-related software to it.

$29.99 per year (or $2.99 per month) gets users the Eero Secure plan, which includes advanced security for all devices connected to the Eero system, content filtering and ad-blocking at hardware level.

Eero Secure + (formerly known as Eero Plus) costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 for a year and bundles a VPN from Encrypt.me, antivirus protection from Malwarebytes and password management from 1Password.

Bought separately, the trio would cost you nearly $280 for a family of five. Assuming that Eero Secure + has no connection limits, that represents a saving of nearly 65 percent for that scenario. 

We have reached out to Amazon for more information about the above, but the launch could prove to be the start of something big for the ecommerce giant.

Amazon VPN coming soon? 

VPN and antivirus were already part of Eero’s offering before Amazon bought it back in February 2019. Given Amazon’s clout and its immense subscription base via Prime - it has more than 100 million subscribers in the US alone - means that it could both the VPN and antivirus markets, very significantly.

What’s more, Amazon is one of the largest owners - if not the largest owner - of compute, storage and networking resources in the world thanks to the millions of servers it hosts. That’s several orders of magnitude bigger than even the biggest VPN provider out there.

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Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.