Prime subscribers were offered it for $99 when it was first announced. I think you had to get put on a waiting list but that's how I ended up with mine.

My mistake. I haven't been a prime subsciber for many years, and didn't realize that they got such a great deal on the Echo at first.

The deal didn't last very long and I don't think many people were familiar with the idea of a home personal assistant device at the time. Siri was around but I think by that point (late 2014) the hype had faded for that quite a bit. There were a few Kickstarters[0] that were trying to tackle the idea but none of them took off, and Amazon came along and made them obsolete.

The Echo was very, very bare bones in terms of functionality at the start. There were like half a dozen basic commands and that was it, so my guess is people who saw the Prime invitations for it didn't think it was even worth the $99. I just scrolled through my inbox to find the oldest "What's new with Alexa" message I was sent from January 30, 2015, and it mentions adding Pandora/Spotify support as well as making the companion phone apps available, so those didn't even exist for the first few months Echo was for sale.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/607691307/ubi-the-ubiqu...

If you preordered when it was first announced, it was $99. Once it was released, the price returned to full $199.

Also the Fire Phone, which as I remember was priced at about $650.

It was $99 for Prime members.