The £100 Firestick: Amazon Hikes Fire TV UK Prices

Amazon has just pushed up the price of almost its entire Fire TV range in the UK, and these aren’t token increases.

The 4K Max is heading for £99.99, a full hundred pounds for a streaming stick. The Cube is jumping to £199.99. Even the cheapest stick in the range is going up by 50%. The same is happening in the US, where prices have risen too.

You might not have noticed any of this yet, and there’s a reason for that. Amazon is running a back-to-school sale in the UK, and every Fire TV stick is currently discounted, some heavily.

The entry-level HD stick is down to £23.99, and the Cube is £30 off. The sale is doing a very effective job of hiding the increases sitting underneath it.

The catch is the date. Once the sale ends (currently set for September 3), those new, much higher prices are what you’ll be paying.

So if a Fire TV stick has been on your list, this is a rare case where “buy now” is the honest advice. Wait a couple of weeks and the same device could cost you £20, £30, even £60 more (at least until the next sale event, that is).

Here’s what’s changed, why it’s happening, and whether any of these sticks are still worth buying at the new prices.

The New Prices Are A Big Jump

Take it device by device and the pattern is the same everywhere: a chunky rise, with the older and pricier models climbing hardest.

The Fire TV Stick HD, Amazon’s cheapest stick, is going from £39.99 to £59.99. That’s a £20 jump on a device that was meant to be the budget option, a 50% increase in one go.

The 4K Select and 4K Plus sit in the middle, up £15 and £20 to £64.99 and £79.99. The 4K Max takes the biggest single jump, a £30 rise to £99.99.

And the Fire TV Cube, a device that launched back in 2022, climbs £60 to £199.99, a hefty increase on hardware that’s already four years old.

Across the range, we’re looking at increases of between 30% and 50%.

Here’s the full picture, with the old prices, the current sale prices, and the new RRPs that kick in once the sale ends. (If you’re on a phone, you can scroll the table left and right.)

One thing worth clearing up, because it may cause some confusion. Other retailers, including Argos and Currys, are still showing the old RRPs on their listings.

You should probably not read too much into that. They’re all selling at the discounted sale prices too, and once the sale is over, Amazon’s new RRP is almost certainly where the whole market will settle.

The old numbers you see elsewhere are on borrowed time.

A Quick Word On Which Sticks These Are

It’s worth a reminder of how the range splits:

The 4K Max and 4K Plus are the older Android-based sticks, running Amazon’s Fire OS with the full app library of more than 30,000 apps, and support for sideloading.

The HD and the 4K Select are the newer models, running Amazon’s own Vega OS instead, which is leaner but currently limited to around 3,000 apps, with no sideloading at all.

That split isn’t going away, it’s the future. Amazon has confirmed that every new Fire TV stick from here on will run Vega, dropping Android for good.

I put a lot of the questions around that decision directly to Amazon’s Fire TV boss earlier this year, and it’s worth a read if you want the fuller picture. The short version is that the Android sticks you can still buy today are the last of their kind.

At these new prices, the OS a stick runs starts to matter more than it used to.

So Why The Hike?

Amazon has confirmed the increases, and pointed to the same culprit we’ve been writing about all year.

An Amazon spokeswoman told Fortune that the consumer electronics industry is “facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs.”

She added: “After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines.”

The company said it still aims to offer products at accessible prices, and that it will run promotions across its lineup throughout the year.

That memory-cost story will sound familiar if you’ve been reading Cord Busters lately.

It’s the same reason Manhattan gave when it raised the price of its Aero Freely box from £69.99 to £89.99, and the same reason its T4-R Freeview recorder went up across the range.

Roku has done it too, raising hardware prices in the US over the summer, Apple has done it, and the list goes on and on.

The mechanism is straightforward enough. The global rush to build AI data centres has created enormous demand for the exact same memory chips and storage that go into consumer gadgets.

The firms building those data centres are buying up components at a scale that has pushed prices up and made supply harder to predict for everyone else.

It’s a real, industry-wide issue rather than an Amazon invention. And in Fire TV’s case, the explanation actually fits the product neatly.

These sticks run on 1GB or 2GB of the kind of RAM that’s caught up in the squeeze, plus flash storage that’s under the same pressure.

None of which makes a hundred-pound streaming stick feel any better at the checkout. But it does mean this is unlikely to be a temporary blip that reverses in a month or two.

The Sale Is Genuine – Just Don’t Get Carried Away

So, should you buy now? If you actually need a stick, yes, the maths is on your side. Paying £23.99 to £47.99 today beats paying £59.99 to £99.99 in September, and that’s not a close call.

But let’s keep it honest, because a discount measured against a brand-new, inflated RRP can flatter itself.

Set against the new prices, these look like enormous 45% to 60% reductions. Set against what the same sticks actually sold for at Prime Day back in June, they’re a little worse – and who knows what we’ll see on Black Friday.

The HD stick was £19.99 at Prime Day and is £23.99 now. The Select was £21.99 and is £26.99. The 4K Plus has jumped the most, from £24.99 in June to £36.99 today.

The Max was £39.99 and is now £47.99. Only the Cube has held level, at £109.99 both times.

So these aren’t the lowest prices we’ve seen this year, not by a stretch. What’s changed is the ceiling above them. A few weeks ago, if you’d missed a sale, the stick went back to a sensible RRP.

After September 3, missing the sale means paying a lot more. That’s the real reason to act now, not because £36.99 for a 4K Plus is a historic low, because it isn’t.

If you weren’t planning to buy, none of this is a reason to start. A discount is never a reason to buy something you don’t need. But if the decision was already made, waiting will only cost you money.

Which Fire TV Stick Is Worth It Now?

Here’s where the new prices really change the calculation, and my advice along with it.

Starting with the HD stick, at £59.99 it’s all but dead in the water. It’s a Vega stick, and so is the 4K Select just above it, and there’s only £5 between them at the new prices.

For that fiver you go from 1080p to full 4K. I can’t see a reason to pick the HD, even on the slim chance you eventually swap your HD telly for a 4K one and wish you’d future-proofed.

There’s a bigger problem, though. The HD stick was always pitched as the entry-level option, the cheap one for a spare bedroom or to chuck in a suitcase. At £59.99, it is not an entry-level stick by any sensible definition. That price simply doesn’t match the job it’s meant to do.

Then there’s the choice between the 4K Plus at £79.99 and the 4K Max at £99.99. For a long time I’ve steered people towards the Max, on the logic that the gap was small enough that you might as well get the better hardware.

That advice doesn’t survive these new prices. A £20 gap is one thing, but when it takes a streaming stick up to a full £100, the calculation flips.

The 4K Plus is more than good enough for the vast majority of people, and I’d happily stick with it and keep the twenty quid.

The one saving grace across the whole range is that the sale prices, for now, still make all of this academic. It’s the September prices that force these decisions, and it’s worth going in knowing which side of them you’d land on.

• Get the Fire TV Stick HD on Amazon
• Get the Fire TV Stick 4K Select on Amazon
• Get the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus on Amazon
• Get the Fire TV Stick 4K Max on Amazon

The Elephant In The Room: Roku

Which brings us to the question hanging over all of this.

Roku, Amazon’s biggest rival on streaming sticks, is running its own back-to-school sale right now too, so at the moment both ranges are discounted and the gap between them is narrower than the headline prices suggest.

It’s once the sales end that the difference really opens up. Amazon’s Fire TV 4K Plus is heading for a £79.99 RRP, while Roku’s closest equivalent, the Roku Streaming Stick Plus, has an RRP of £39.99. That’s a £40 gulf at full price, and it’s the RRPs that matter once the discounts disappear.

If Roku holds its UK prices while Amazon pushes Fire TV up towards and past the hundred-pound mark, the value argument tilts sharply in Roku’s favour.

If Roku follows Amazon up, we’re all just paying more for streaming sticks than we were a year ago, full stop. For now, nobody can say which way it goes, and that uncertainty is worth keeping in mind before you commit to any device at these prices.

One way or another, the era of the cheap, almost throwaway streaming stick looks like it’s coming to an end. Enjoy the back-to-school prices while they last.

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