1 - Don't try to school me on being cheap.
I am far from cheap, so I would never even dream of trying to school you on being cheap. Frugal, yes, cheap, no. I will gladly pay what something is worth, but I will take the extra time to make sure I am getting the best price for my needs. If I can save a pile of money with a coupon, then it is worth the effort, but I realized a long time ago that sweating the pennies would make me lose sight of the dollars.. To each their own.
2 - The price is the same for the stuff I'm buying.
I'm not disputing that you are buying stuff that isn't inflated for inclusion in Prime, just pointing out that it is becoming exceedingly rare. Even when there isn't a vendor that sells it cheaper without Prime on Amazon, usually it means you can find it elsewhere for less and still have free shipping. If you can do this for products you actually need AND make sure the stuff you are buying is not available anywhere else for cheaper, then kudos.
3 - If you're paying $100 a year for Prime it's only because you're too stupid to mooch a .edu address off a community college.
OR, I happen to also be doing business with them, so lying to save $100 when it can cost me tens of thousands is probably a really dumb idea. I have five accounts with Amazon, all different sites, all the same login and username (kdp, amazon, ams, authorcentral, createspace). Amazon knows when someone I am acquainted with posts a review of my books and removes it. They know if the person is a facebook friend, if they are posting from my IP address, or if they have ever received any kind of order from me, gift or otherwise. I am pretty sure they can figure out that I am using an .edu account just to pirate a free year of Prime. The only question is when they will act on it and what they do when they act on it.
But hey, you figured out how to bilk the company of more money, so again, kudos.
I get entertainment reading about the creative ways you use loopholes...
The best loophole I ever saw was already closed up last July.. but dozens of legit authors took advantage, and hundreds of scammers milked hundreds of thousands of dollars from the other authors before it was closed up. See, you could publish a "book" that was only a few pages of crap you scraped off the internet and put a title like "How to get cheap crap from Amazon" and place it in the Select program where anyone in Kindle Unlimited or Prime could borrow it for free. By simply opening it, the "author" got $1.40. Even without automating it, you could scrape together (from blogs and the such) several dozen "books" (or "scamphlets" as we called them) of unique non-copyright content in a matter of a few hours, and if each got 20 borrows in the month you could make hundreds of dollars per day. Or if you chose to be legit, break up a full story into 50 sections, publish two "episodes" per week, and once you hooked a few dozen readers, you could make hundreds per month. The better authors would do this and get a few thousand readers and make tens of thousands per month. The program changed to pay based on pages actually read though, so now those scammers can't make money and the legit authors make about $200 per month on what they would make $10,000 per month on before. This scam was available for nearly 3 years before it was closed up. There were some unhappy authors when it changed, but since I never got on that gravy train, I am happy (my payout for a borrow went up from $1.40 to $4.75 once the scammers weren't milking the pool.)