Video Doorbell v2 with limited service from app…
They not only want to sell their cameras for top dollar then after buying they want to charge me monthly for the rest of my life for what should be included… Wyze is getting close to a class action lawsuit for promising so much to sell their cameras then pull the rug out with lifetime fees for those services… They’ll never get a dime from me other than being my last Wyze camera purchase…
People on here routinely suggest class action lawsuits against wyze. It’d be great if all those people could form some sorta group to help get that off the ground. Then, maybe someday down the ro’… I can get a check in the mail for 50 cents!
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Top dollar? What other medium to large size Smart home company is selling a 2.5K Video Doorbell with free SD card recordings (and more) for a cheaper price? And how much cheaper is it?
If you mean cloud recording, then yes, Cloud storage has ongoing fees for a company, so basically ALL companies charge ongoing subscriptions for cloud recordings.
But you can use the doorbell as a doorbell pretty well without any subscription. I have friends and family that do this. They have the SD card record all their events for free, and they still get notifications/calls when someone presses the doorbell button. It works pretty well that way. They even set up a detection zone so that motion notifications come when anyone enters their port area.
If you mean that you have to pay for Person Detections, then I do agree. I think Wyze should be offering free person detection for everyone on all their newer cameras now from now on (with edge/local AI built in, not cloud AI which will have ongoing costs).
Other than that, can you elaborate what they are charging for that should be free and included? I don’t know that it’s reasonable to think a company should include cloud services for free when it costs them a lot of money per device to use cloud features. Any company would go broke quickly if they did that, which is why basically none do unless they jack their prices up really high then make sure to EOL the device after a couple years. I don’t want Wyze to do that. I like being able to keep using my cams for years and years.
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Brings a thought to mind… How about a method to save to a free cloud service?
Dropbox, oneDrive and many others offer free cloud storage. I guess the purported “AI” would need to move onboard to the cam.
I would be happy with offline storage so if my cam is stolen I still have the video. For me, AI is just fluff.
I just dislike subscription services in general. I have enough reoccurring bills to pay already.
I am surpised Roku hasn’t gone to a subscription service for the many options they provide.
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Not as greedy as the rest, I guess 
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This is actually one of the things that attracted me to Wyze in the First place. You can Link your Wyze cams to Tiny Cam, then have Tiny Cam save recordings to Dropbox or other cloud services exactly like this. And Tiny Cam allows free person detection too. Tiny Cam compatibility was the initial reason I went with Wyze, with the intent to use Tiny Cam as my primary app for Wyze cams. Wyze eventually won me over with all the other convenient interoperability with sensors, etc., but it was the possibility of self-storage and free person detection that was the deciding factor for me in the first place (compared to the few others I had narrowed my comparison/decision down to).
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I will have to revisit Tiny Cam. I encountered some issues in the past with Tiny Cam. I might have been short on patience when I first looked.
They break even or lose money on most of the cams in hopes they’ll upsell the subscription. Mine work fine for me with no subscription and a decent SD card in each.
If you think this is bad, go pay many times as much for a Blink or Ring doorbell cam only to have them upsell you on a more expensive plan than Wyze.
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I stopped using Tiny Cam when I got my Pixel 5 a while ago, for some reason I could not get it to work well on my Pixel 5 and it continually crashed the app, etc. It was basically unusable. And Wyze launched their Web Portal which made it convenient for me to view 15+ Cameras at a time on half of 1 monitor (I have 4 monitors for this computer and use half of one of them often dedicated to showing 15 cameras on the web portal). Now that I upgraded to a Pixel 8 Pro, it is back to working well again, so I use it sometimes now, but the truth is that the web portal works amazingly, and so does most everything else, so I haven’t really had a huge need for Tiny Cam, but it is still an amazing option for those who want to go completely subscription free and still get AI detections, get RTSP, local storage, etc.
But yeah, it does seem like sometimes Tiny Cam works better on some devices than others. It HATED my Pixel 5 for some reason 
but likes my Pixel 8 Pro now.
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Agreed, Blink and Ring are nowhere near as good as Wyze, ESPECIALLY without a subscription. They even take away features that don’t cost them anything unless you pay a subscription, and their subscription is generally more expensive, and doesn’t include as much. I still have/use a Blink camera for redundancy but it is disappointing compared to my Wyze alternatives. I gave away 4 other Blink cameras for free because they were so bad in comparison. No contest IMO, either “Free” or with a subscription (I have used both).
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I have experience with Blink having helped friends and neighbors set theirs up. Not only did they pay a lot more, but after seeing video from mine vs. theirs after some car break ins that happened, they all want to switch. They’ve been very finnicky to get to trigger “enough but not too much” too. The subscription (came with 30 days free) seemed fine but it was more expensive and didn’t have anything special other than cloud recording. Plus with theirs they had to buy a “Sync” module to get thumb drive recording, and it has trouble keeping up with 3 or 4 cams, only one can record to the fairly fast and good quality thumb drive at a time.
I posted a video of a family of deer walking up my street to my city’s Facebook page (not uncommon to see deer in the woods or crossing a street quickly, but 5 of them casually meandering up a suburban street is unusual). I got inundated with “what brand cameras are those, the video is so much better than mine”. I almost didn’t have the heart to tell them they were like $15 each ($28 with the good SD cards I bought).
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How about Tapo cams? Any experience with TP-link cams. I heard good reports of their non-subscription cams.
So far I am content to stay with Wyze cams.
I do love Kasa bulbs a lot more than Wyze’s bulbs.
A lot of people say the Eufy are better for including everything without subscription, obviously up front cost is higher. I haven’t used them.
I would imagine TP Link are decent, their other stuff is, but any camera brand is going to have benefits and disadvantages over another, especially when we’re talking relatively inexpensive wifi ones.
Arlo seems to make it onto a lot of top rated lists, no experience there either though.
For me, price per features, the Wyze was a winner, especially during the prime day sale I bought them on last year. I do not regret my purchase, they haven’t been perfect but for my needs, a great value.
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I bought a 2K Pan Eufy cam. Seems to work okay but I only use it inside the house when I travel. I like the tracking feature. I haven’t tried their fixed cams, yet.
Yup. That’s what I do, and I’ve been mostly pleased with the experience so far.
Yup.
Yup-yup.
You mean like what Wyze seems to be doing with “free” Person Detection with Edge AI on Cam v4? 
Love for the OG! 
The Carver may or may not have picked up a Tapo C120 recently after I posted some favorable comments elsewhere. 
If you’re interested, I also answered some other questions about that camera in several posts in a different topic.
What do you like about those? I have some Kasa smart switches only because Wyze wasn’t yet making any at the time I wanted them, and I’ve been pleased with their performance.
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Motion tracking works really slick on the Pan v3 too. Only thing I’ve found is it doesn’t seem to care about your detection zone when motion tracking is on, it tracks motion and logs events regardless. Hasn’t been a huge issue.
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Yeah, one of the few strong disagreements I have with Wyze. They have rarely done that sort of thing. Ring is atrocious with it though:
- No saving, reviewing or sharing video recordings even locally = completely ridiculous
- Can’t even take a snapshot to save locally
- Rich Notifications are borderline. I guess technically there is an insignificant cloud cost for thumbnails.
- Basically all you can do is use the liveview and nothing else unless you pay. Everything else is paywalled. That’s just insane.
The only paywall for basically free stuff that Wyze currently does is the Edge AI on the V4. It’s a bad precedent, and I disagree with them, but at least they DO have some rationales about the ongoing cost and shared them:
Edge AI takes a lot of manpower and research to implement on each compatible device. While no longer a recurring cost to produce, the upfront cost of developing a device with Edge AI is high. And once developed and launched, Edge-powered devices still require ongoing maintenance, accuracy improvement, and optimization. Making Edge AI free on all devices, even if possible, would increase costs tremendously for our users - no bueno.
Again, I don’t fully agree with that, but it’s not 100% unreasonable if they are REALLY going to continue to pay people to keep making it better on an ongoing basis. Personally, if that is their concern I think the better move would be to basically leave the AI model alone after a camera launches and just update the model on future cams. Then there isn’t an ongoing cost and they can allow it free to people on that model and give them an excuse to keep updating to other cameras in the future if they want the new stuff. At least then they’d be living up to their principle of “making great tech affordable to everyone” instead of paywalling great tech contrary to their core principles which have always been one huge reason I have long loved Wyze. The precedent moderately concerns me that they’re potentially slipping and forgetting the foundational values that made many of us fall in love with them.
To be fair, I’ve been planning to buy one of those for at least 8 months since the day LifeHackster first posted a video of it, calling it a “Wyze Killer”…partially been waiting for it to have a good sale so I could test it out myself, so when it was on steep sale for Prime Day, it was just the right time. 
Yes, as stated above, I recently got one to test it out. I just noticed that Lifehackster made a pretty good comparison Video between the Wyze V4 vs the Tapo C120:
Once upon a time, I would’ve said Eufy was Wyze’s Main competition, but no longer. Eufy went a slightly different direction that makes them a little more unique. The Tapo C120 is definitely Wyze’s number 1 competition at the moment. I’d say second place goes to Reolink after that. The V4 is a pretty awesome camera, I even just bought 2 more within the last week. I think they just made a mistake of not offering Edge AI free.
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From the video, it appears the TP Link won’t even give you a snapshot on the notification unless you pay for a subscription. That would be a real pain to have to review SD video for every notification to see what it was. I guess maybe there is a list of pictures in the app that you can review? If not that’s a total deal breaker for me.
Video Quality wise, it looks like TP Link is using even more compression than Wyze (which I thought was impossible) or maybe their sensor just isn’t as good. I’d choose the V4 from that comparison, and his video comparing the OG to the V4 shows they’re very close in video quality. So sticking with my OGs at this point, see no need to upgrade.
So I guess if free AI features are critical, maybe the TP Link is worth considering, otherwise I don’t see it as being superior to the Wyze in any other way. Given the very low cost of Wyze’s subscription, even then it still may be worth the better video and sound quality to stick with them.
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That is correct.
That is correct
I am not sure, TBH. I have gone back and forth on this. What I would REALLY like is for someone like Jon @TheNetGuyDotCom to do a comparison/review because he has a really cool card that measures the compression effect. He did this with the Wyze V3Pro and it was really useful. I’d love to see someone do this for a comparison between the V4 vs the Tapo C120 to see the compression. But in my experience, the bitrate is very similar between them. I’m guessing the compression is too.
The Tapo C120 is not perfect by any means, and it’s not enough to convince me to switch to them as my primary, but it has some awesome things for sure and I like when other companies put pressure on Wyze because competition is good for everyone. It will force Wyze to try to continue to innovate and add more value too. I highly support that. That’s honestly what I like most about the Tapo C120…it keeps Wyze from getting complacent. 
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I like that I don’t need an app to turn the lights on or off by just using the sound of my voice.
I like that I verbally can set the Kelvin temperature of the light (2700K or 6500K), along with percentage of brightness and whatever color I want. I tried using all sorts of colors. I learned what chartreuse looks like.
I believe I have had the lights more than a month. I have two bulbs grouped over my entertainment center for non-intrusive lighting.
I will check out your Tapo reviews. They might be a good alternative if Wyze ever goes south. Thanks for the info.