Ring Video Doorbell Customers Angry At 43% Price Hike - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

• You were the ones who signed up for the creepy always spying camera that lets the cops just shuffle through your videos without a warrant. What did you think was going to happen? I know, you didn't think.

• This is why (well that and overreaching surveillance) why I bought a group of PoE cameras that work with a wide variety of platforms. Store to my local NAS. No ongoing subscription. I won't buy devices that can't be used except with a subscription, or that allow the seller to brick them at will.

  • Re:

    >Store to my local NAS

    I did the the same but subscribed to a $5/month vm to store the footage/s

    I am just kidding, my house cameras store the footage in my office building and vice-versa.

    "Store to my local NAS" doesn't seem really clever to me.

    • Didn't say it was clever (weird take there). My point was that controlling your own storage and using widely compatible cameras allows one to control one's own destiny, as opposed to being held hostage by proprietary "walled cloud" devices.

    • Re: PoE cameras + NAS

      He's not claiming to be clever but he actually is: he's saving on cost. Besides his NAS could be replicating to another appliance buried in his backyard.

  • Re:

    Yep. Beyond that, I block them at my firewall and pass them through a Home Assistant instance so only data I want to get to the Internet gets out and they can't call home to the manufacturer.

    And if you set up motion alarms and image snapshots, you can have them forward to a secondary site so even if someone rips your hardware out, you still get a picture of them.

  • Re:

    Exactly. The second you buy hardware that locks you to a cloud service provider, you're at their mercy, and they can do anything they want, and all you can do is junk the hardware. You pay more up front, because you have to buy an NVR or whatever to store the video somewhere, but everything is under your control.

  • Re:

    Is there a good wireless one with online remote access without subscriptions?

    • Re:

      I use Eufy and they have apps for Windows, Mac's and different phones that work great. Anything detected will send an alert to my phone. Doesn't tattle lie Ring and NO subscription !!!

• by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday February 09, 2024 @07:07PM (#64228772)

  Drop Ring. Don't renew. It's that simple.

  The only way to get a company's attention is to have its revenue and profits plunge. If a company goes out of business as a result, so be it. It's about sending a message.

  • In this case the company is Amazon. They could discontinue Ring entirely and it would hardly be a blip on their balance sheets.

    I'm not sure where the article is getting 43% from. The subscription is going up by $1/mo, from $3.99 to $4.99; that's not a 43% increase. At the end of the day, it comes down to if you feel your time spent replacing your doorbell with an alternate product is worth the savings.

    • Re:

      If people stopped buying from Amazon, they'd take note. But because it's so simple to do it won't be done.

    • Re:

      I am guessing the price wasn't the same in all locations. From the 2nd link.

    • Re:

      Math is hard.
      You would be correct if you only paid for one month. The thing is the scummy subscription has 12 months.

• Cancel it. Your hardware wasn't an investment, that's a sunk cost fallacy. There are lots of alternatives. Move on.

• This is the real reason that will resonate with 'regular' people and let them know why cloud services suck.
  Privacy, lock-in, and all that don't register with free/open software enthusiasts.
  But price hikes that you can do nothing about will...

• In case anyone is looking for an alternative, I switched to Eufy when Ring thought they could give my security away to the Cops. Like Ring, Eufy is occasionally buggy but my video is stored on my device. Eufy lets me know when a package is delivered. No subscription.
  • 1 hidden comment

  • Re: I Switched to Eufy When Ring Enshittified

    Yup, When I looked at ring and the subscription, then compared to Eufy, it was a no brainer. The newer cameras have onboard memory to offload some storage from the Homebase.

• I've been a RING customer since 2018. I went back to look at the billing history and realized it's been steadily going up while the only change I've seen is being able to view 90 days of videos. That was the only new feature I saw in all those years.

  Our complex put in Wyze cameras and floods, so I'm replacing my RING with a couple of those cameras. Then I can join the complex's SKYNET.

  Sent RING a GOODBYE FELICIA email with Linus Torvalds flipping them the bird.

  • Re:

    Wyze isn't any better. They keep increasing their Cam Plus prices. Among other issues.

    My cameras will randomly not be recognized as having Cam Plus subscription (not the Lite tier) and so it won't continuously record most events to the cloud. I do have samsung pro endurance microSD cards in the cameras, so I won't miss anything, however the app does take a long time to connect to cameras in order to playback the recorded video.

    Going on two years now unfortunately the cameras will have gaps in video recordin

• I left Ring a year or two ago because they did a 25% rate hike. I also was mainly using it to prove Amazon wasn't delivering my packages... and then I realized there is a conflict of interest, there. I wonder how many people accepted the rate hike so Amazon can continue being lazy-asses about proper package delivery?

• Buy into subscriptions