Cam Plus vs Free Features - A question for the CEO

There is a wish in this post, bare with me.

I’ve been a backer and fan of Wyze since the beginning. The simple reason was they offered affordable, feature rich tech with no monthly fee and local storage. That has slowly disappeared and I feel duped.

Having invested in multiple cams, vacuums, and sensors, I feel suddenly stuck with a company that has turned a 180 from their roots and has slowly turned into a more affordable “ring” but “ring” none the less.

The lack of advanced detection (people , pets, packages, etc.) in the free account is unfair to say the least. It was once offered for as a no cost innovation, then suddenly removed and reintroduced as a paid service with “cam
Plus.”

If Wyze wants to offer cloud services, offer cloud services. Additional storage should cost money, no question. But to add these incredible AI detection features only available to subscribers is losing the concept of how Wyze originally advertised themselves and relabels the company just another corporate subscription based company.

I considered subscribing to “cam plus” because Wyze is an exceptional company and I’m happy to pay for the innovation they continue to provide. Problem is, it’s per month, per camera. Not one fee for all cams, not even an option for all cams, just per cam, per month. Disappointing.

Wish: please have the CEO read and address this. Bring back the old Wyze.

Hello @b0nn3r and welcome to the community

This is primarily a user to user community, but I will do what I can to see if I can get your post seen by someone at Wyze who can get where it needs to go.

Thanks. Tried the usual channels, but kept getting referred to customer support phone number.

I hope you do know that:

A. As an older user you were entitled to sign up for free person detection perpetually. If you took advantage of that offer you would not need to pay for CamPlus.

B. The *incredible AI detection features" as they currently perform them require server side processing that costs non-trivial amounts of money. So their decision to charge extra for them (over the cost of their cheapo cameras) was not entirely arbitrary.

I’m not sure why you think this is a CEO level complaint except that you want even more.

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Yes, I was aware of that offer. Should be included (as other companies do) to all customers, server side costs are recognized.

Compromises can be easily made - trading storage of 12 second cloud events of free users for processing of AI feautures. SD card can be utilized for viewing of events - I’d forgo 12 second cloud event to have all the premium features at no cost. I’ll use the SD card storage for viewing full events remotely.

My point is there are many ways to offer the additional features of the camera software to the free users without impacting the business profits. But the software is stunted unless you pay a stacked monthly fee per cam. It is purposefully designed to gain subscribers.

The issue at hand is the slow development of yet another subscription subsidized company.

You don’t have to agree. Thanks for your interest. Looking forward to a reply from the top.

That is simply not so. It is very obviously not so.

It is though. Would like to hear from Wyze either way.

Like @Customer mentioned, currently AI detection is processed server side, so without cloud events/involvement, no AI detection.

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I understand that. I know how the detection works. I understand the process requires the analysis of the video and the temporary storage of the event while the detection process occurs. What I was alluding to as a solution/option is to forego storing the 12 second clip for 24 hours after it’s been analyzed and tagged appropriately.

Thanks for your reply.

That doesn’t save them any money or make up for the loss. The analyzing (CPU processing) costs them much more than the storage, even longer term. It’s not an even trade off at all. Check the Amazon Web Services rates for yourself.

Looked into it. Assuming they’re using AWS for processing the video for person detection, it is more expensive than simply storing video. However, I couldn’t find anything stating Wyze uses AWS for its AI processing. Again, you aren’t Wyze, response is simply requested from Wyze. You aren’t going to provide me an answer that changes my mind on this because you have no answers.

Either way, this was one random idea by one guy as to a possible alternative option for allowing free person detection. Again, there’s a team here that I’m sure can come up with a way to provide these AI services at no cost as Eufy and others are currently doing. Or maybe they simply prefer subscription based profits. Fine if they do, just want to hear from Wyze.

We do run the AI processing when the videos are uploaded to AWS. I’ll send this to Yun but I don’t know if he’ll have more to add to the conversation here. :slight_smile:

Yea cool of you to answer, thanks. Mainly curious if certain free features (that have local solutions already like storage to SD card etc) can be given up to obtain the more useful ones like person recognition etc.

Hey @b0nn3r was right and I was wrong!

They DID go ahead and compromise with the new CamPlus Lite person detection tier for all, trading off customers who don’t sign up and removing their cloud event storage.

(This thread turned up as suggested for an unrelated discussion.)