Freevee Review 2024: Cost, Plans, and More

Is Amazon Freevee good?

Freevee is a pretty good deal if you’re thinking economically—you get access to live looping channels, original content, and even select Amazon Prime Video titles, all for the low price of free. But compared to other free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) services, it’s difficult to navigate and a bit of a pain to use.

Amazon Freevee pros and cons

• No cost
• Monthly Amazon Originals
• Big library of shows + movies

• Horrible navigation
• Unskippable ads
• Requires Amazon account

Jump to:

• Deals
• Plans and prices
• Freevee vs. competition
• Specs and features

Freevee deals

As the name implies, Amazon Freevee is already free, so you won’t find any sort of discount. But if you’re looking for an Amazon Prime Video deal, look no further. Amazon uploaded over 100 of its Originals to Freevee over the course of 2023, and they’re all still available to stream.

Is Freevee really free?

Yes, Freevee is really free, so there are no plans or prices to worry about. It’s just one example of the latest trend in streaming TV: Free, Ad-Supported Streaming Television (FAST) streaming services. A lot of streaming services are now investing in FAST services as homes for their older content, although the definition of “old” may vary. In recent years, more and more “prestige” titles have found their way over to the FAST model, which often involves live channels and a library of seemingly random shows and movies.

It might be a little disheartening to see services backpedal on producing new content and go back to the old status-quo of live TV. For a while, viewers were treated to ad-free content on their own schedule, but those days may be coming to a close.

It’s not all so bad, though. FAST services are a smart response to the streaming service fatigue many viewers experience with an oversaturation of options in recent years. With almost every paid service raising their prices and mercilessly removing old content, free services might be worth a few annoying Uber One ads.

Freevee vs. competition

Data effective as of post date. Offers and availability may vary by location and are subject to change.

There are a lot of FAST services out there, and it can be hard to differentiate between them. Freevee has one of, if not, the worst interfaces of the bunch, but it has a couple of advantages over the competition.

Freevee’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t hide its exclusive scripted content in confusing livestreams. You can watch Freevee and Amazon Originals any time, not just at 1:27 p.m. ET on a random Tuesday in March like some FAST services (cough cough, the last six episodes of HBO’s The Nevers that never fully materialized on Tubi and The Roku Channel). Freevee’s live channels are mostly reality TV like Forged in Fire, where continuity is less of a concern, and many (but not all) live shows are also available on demand.

Also unlike HBO, Amazon Prime Video isn’t removing its content just to put it on Freevee—the content is living on both services simultaneously, so you can choose whether you’d rather go with an ad-free paid subscription or an ad-supported free one.

Apart from original content, though, many FAST services host a lot of the same titles from the same licensing deals. The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, for example, is available on The Roku Channel, Tubi, Crackle, Pluto TV, Plex, and Freevee. At that point, it’s just about brand loyalty and ease of use, and you might not be enough of an Amazon superfan to put up with its poor navigation system.

There’s also the matter of signing up—many of Freevee’s competitors don’t require signup to start watching, but Freevee does. Jeff Bezos will get every person on the planet to make an Amazon account even if he dies trying.

Freevee live channels

Freevee’s channels aren’t like traditional cable TV channels. Each “channel” is a live stream focused on one particular show or theme. Your navigation experience may vary. On the browser version of the site, you’ll only see a handful of popular livestreams, while on the iPad version, you’ll see an unsorted feed of every livestream.

FAST live channels feel tailor-made to play in the background while you do something else, like the ultimate doctor’s office waiting room simulator. Most of Freevee’s live TV channels are reality TV, court shows, news programs, and reruns of older cable shows. If you want a nonstop drip of Leverage and Teen Wolf episodes, Freevee is the place for you.

Most of Freevee’s titles are also available on demand—you have the option to catch The Addams Family both on demand and as a livestream—but this doesn’t extend to all shows. Sorry Teen Wolf fans, you’ll have to settle for the live channel unless you want to pay to watch your favorite lycanthropes on Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, or Paramount+.

Here are just a few of the channels you can expect to see on Freevee:

Freevee channel lineup

Freevee shows and movies

Amazon Freevee has a lot of the content you would expect from a FAST service, including a lot of knock-off animated kids’ movies. It occasionally gets the rights to a big movie franchise, like John Wick, but generally its strength is more in its TV shows. It’s got a lot of old cable shows from the ‘00s and ‘10s.

Freevee’s biggest draw, at least according to its marketing, is its collection of Amazon Prime Video Originals. The company added handful of Originals to the platform each month in 2023, although it’s not clear whether this practice will continue into 2024.

Of course, Freevee also has its own Freevee Originals, although many are holdovers from when the service was called IMDb TV. It’s frustratingly difficult to encounter these originals. Timewasters shows up on the Fire Stick interface but not on the iPad app, for instance—and Freevee’s UI makes it impossible to search for and view all of them unless you know the title by name. Have no fear, though: Surprise internet favorite Jury Duty is usually pushed pretty hard on all platforms.

Amazon added dozens of its original Prime Video titles to Freevee in 2023, and while they’re advertised as remaining “for a limited time,” it’s unclear when they’ll expire. The best way to find a full list is to check the carousels in the TV app, since the mobile app only lists a handful of eligible titles.

It’s worth noting that this Freevee perk may soon become outdated, as Amazon is planning on putting ads on all Prime Video content, even for paying subscribers, at the end of January. What this means for Freevee’s continued existence remains to be seen.

Freevee specs and features

Since Freevee is a FAST service, you don’t have to worry about different plans with different simultaneous streaming limits. It also doesn’t give you any options for video quality unless you watch through Amazon Prime Video, where you get three resolution options: Good, Better, and Best. It tells you how much data this’ll munch up (Best is 6.84GB per hour, for example) but for some reason doesn’t actually use resolution numbers or terms like HD or SD.

This is only the first of many confusing user experience (UX) decisions you’ll find in your Freevee journey.

Freevee user experience

Freevee’s user experience is pretty terrible. There’s no way of sorting by category or collection; you’re stuck scrolling through the homepage until you see a relevant topic, like “romance movies,” and even then you’ll only get about ten suggestions.

The best way to navigate is to search for the title you want by name, which is an objectively horrible way to discover new content.

There’s also the matter of Amazon Prime Video integration—for existing subscribers, it’s often hard to tell where the Amazon Prime content ends and the Freevee content begins.

The Freevee app

The best way to watch Freevee is through the TV app. The mobile app is similar, but worse, because it only shows a fraction of the service’s library, for some reason.

The Freevee app is divided into four tabs: Home, Popular Live Programs, Search, and “My list.” Ignoring the fact that the heading formatting is wildly inconsistent across these four pages (sorry, I can’t unsee it now that I’ve noticed), Freevee’s interface … leaves much to be desired. The best way to navigate it is to immediately add a title you want to your watchlist—because it’ll likely be impossible to find it later.

The home screen is an endless scroll of side-scrolling carousel lists separated by genre, much like you’d see on something like Netflix. However, Freevee’s approach is much worse. There’s no way to just look at one category, so if for example you’re trying to see all the anime on the platform, your only option is to just search the word “anime” and hope for the best.

It’s relatively easy to find the available Amazon Originals, at least—it’s usually a few rows down, with an Uber One sponsorship designation to remind you this is the free version of a paid service. It’s probably still too far down considering it’s the main draw for picking Freevee over the dozens of other FAST services, but at least it’s there.

The lower-profile Freevee Originals are usually a couple of rows down too, but on mobile it’s impossible to tell if the 15 titles on that list are all you get (they’re not, and you get a more comprehensive list on the TV app.)

The livestream tab is even less organized. Rather than providing genre categories, Freevee dumps every live channel on the same page, organized by popularity, and tells you to figure it out for yourself. You can’t even add a channel to your list for later! And if you’re hoping you can find livestreams using the search tab, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

As for the “My list” section itself, it’s fine. It suggests customizability with a little menu that labels your current view as “Recently Added (Newest on top),” but upon clicking you realize that “Recently Added” is the only view available to you. Are more views supposed to be patched in later? It’s just another detail that makes the iOS app feel half-baked—technically functional, but missing key elements that a streaming service should have in 2023.

Freevee through Amazon Prime Video

While Freevee still exists, you can no longer find it through Prime Video’s browser interface. It used to live under the name “Free with ads,” but Amazon is phasing out that language ahead of its upcoming move to include ads on all Prime Video titles at the end of January. The Freevee-specific content is still there, though; it’s just extremely buried, and requires some random scrolling to find.

The quickest way to get to Freevee content through the browser is to click on “Live TV.” This only shows Freevee channels, though; the rest of Freevee’s content is mixed in with the rest of the “Movies” and “TV” sections.

Bafflingly, there’s no way to sort through just Freevee titles. Sure, if you’ve already got a Prime account, you can just watch Prime Originals the normal way, but isn’t this service supposed to be an accessible alternative for non-Prime subscribers? And beyond the occasional banner ad for Judy Justice, how is anyone supposed to find the Freevee Originals?

If you don’t like having to manually search for the title you want, Freevee probably isn’t the service for you.

Freevee devices

Is Freevee worth it?

Freevee is a nice option to (legally!) watch Amazon Prime Video Originals without paying for a subscription. You might not get to watch episodes as they come out, but there’s probably some titles in there that you missed the first time around (fingers crossed for Paper Girls!). There’s also a growing number of Freevee originals, like the viral hit Jury Duty with James Marsden, which will probably be the biggest draw for a lot of people.

Freevee has a lot of what you’d expect from a free service: live reality TV marathons, knockoff animated movies and some truly awful UI. But its TV offerings are pretty decent if you’re into ’00s and ’10s cable TV favorites like Lost and Mad Men. And with a price tag of “free,” there’s not much to lose.

Freevee FAQ

Methodology

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