Stand alone Person Detection is only available to people that had Wyze accounts before Nov. 2019. Both US and Canada. It’s a long story.
The only option for newer customers is Cam Plus.
I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the old Person Detection is killed off.
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If they follow their past actions it probably will
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Right?!.. I hope not…
But I would think so as well since I would venture to say that most people aren’t contributing high dollar amounts (nor have the disposable income to do so) towards Person Detection at its current state of functionality and reliability.
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The fact that Wyze extended the deadline does not bode well for a great acceptance rate. If I had to guess PD goes away or is renamed PD+ or something with a per month fee.
I don’t think it’s fair to retroactively pull this feature out from paid customers. We already lost the superior AI person detection. The new person detection is not up to the standards set previously.
I talked to support and got mine turned back on and put $0 for a dollar amount. I’m not going to pay a monthly subscription fee on a $25 dollar camera when the feature should be free for users who prefer using local storage!
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I’d think just the opposite, actually. If they were still losing money off of it because of having more people select $0 than paying something to cover the costs, then they would be stupid to extend the deadline, it would only cause them to have even more accounts putting them into debt with extra costs they can’t afford. Best to cut the losses at a much smaller number.
They said multiple times that if they can get this scheme to work and cover their costs that they would likely expand it and probably include all users. The fact that they have indeed EXPANDED it to include more people who didn’t make it in by the original deadline is actually a very good sign that it is working and that they aren’t trying to keep the losses small and just let it die off like they would do if it wasn’t working. If you’re losing money on a thousand people, why open it up to ten thousand or a million and make your losses 10 to 1,000 times worse? That wouldn’t make any sense at all…in a situation like this you only expand it (like you previously said you would) if it IS working. I’d say it is a VERY good sign.
Still it is fairly irrelevant. With the launch of V3’s coming up, they will quit selling V2’s, old ones will phase out, that smaller market will dwindle, get replaced and become insignificant, that program will be hardly worth mentioning or known about within a couple of years.
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It IS free for local storage. I have a 64 GB Micro card in each of the 4 indoor cameras, and 1 in the base station for the wireless outdoor cameras. All recording/motion/person detection is done locally, and a continuous loop is stored. There’s no need to store anything ‘in the cloud’ ( basically, GCP, AWS or Azure data-lakes ).
I don’t draw the same conclusion as you obviously. Time will tell.
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It USED to be free, but then XNOR.AI severed their contract with Wyze and Wyze was forced to disable the edge person detection (done with hardware on the device), because they no longer had the license to use it. That forced them to do person detection in the cloud. If you had old firmware you may still have access to the XNOR.ai stuff, but I finally gave up and pushed new firmware to my cameras so I lost it, even for local storage.
We’re not talking about storing we’re talking about the Person Detection. I was able to get it back from talking to support yesterday but I had to go through some nag screens asking for a monthly donation subscription.
I don’t either.
They didn’t expand the offer to more people, they extended the deadline for the same people.
To me it looks like the results of a poor response.
Going by some of the posts in this forum I think a lot of Wyze users had no idea what the offer was and / or got confused by Wyze’s attempts to hide the $0 option. I’m not sure they could have made signup more confusing.
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Right, but do you have an “XNOR.ai” picture showing on any of your videos? If not, you are using the cloud person detection. They can’t legally use the edge person detection anymore.
I don’t think time will really tell, actually. Even if it does work, it won’t be more profitable than Cam Plus. They are allowing it only to appease long-time supporters. I think their plan is to phase it out and make it irrelevant either way, even if it is successful. It won’t be available for future accounts or future devices, so everyone will be forced onto the much more profitable Cam Plus regardless.
The end result will be the same, and so it’s unlikely that time will tell in this case unless Wyze specifically announces that it failed and why it failed (maybe it succeeds in covering the costs, but fails in bringing in as much profit as their investors demand). Either way, it will get phased out, so we at least agree on the ultimate outcome, so I suppose it doesn’t matter. They can expand it now knowing that it will quickly die off over time with the launch of V3’s and soon no more V2 devices or improvements/support, forcing people to stop using this old program anyway.
Even if you’re right that it means this program is failing, I’m positive it will go through the same process of elimination anyway.
Time will tell. 
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Now, this is a valid rationale. I don’t know how anyone could’ve missed all the constant forced and repeated spam about it for the last several months, but I totally understand the difficulty and confusion from being able to sign up for $0. Initially making it easy to do $0, then changing later and making it difficult to do $0 is indicative of it not working, so that is a valid point.
Also, Wyze a employee (Gwendolyn) has said a credit card is not required to sign up for $0. That wasn’t the case for me.
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When I signed up, it was really simple. I even initially signed up for $0 just to reserve everything and figured I can change things at will when I had more time to think about what it’s worth. I didn’t need a credit card, it didn’t try to force me to pay anything, I had no confusion, no problems, it was very straightforward.
Weeks or months later other people are suddenly having all sorts of problems and hoops to sign up like you are describing…so yeah, I’d agree that is a bad sign that they felt the need to complicate what was actually quite simple initially.
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I do think time will tell simply because I don’t think enough people signed up (at any price). If so according to Wyze they would be forced to cancel the offer and proceed to a set rate option.
So this either succeeds or fails in a month or so. Either way we will know soon I think. I could be wrong but that’s the takeaway I got from Gwendolyn.
You think they will actually offer PD separately from Cam Plus at a set rate?
I hope you’re right, I know they’ve suggested this being the case (though they’ve also said they don’t know what they’ll do if it fails, not that they will offer it separately). Personally, I don’t see that ever happening. I think they will just tell everyone it failed and that your only option is Cam Plus now, but hey, Cam plus will now give you Person, Pet, Vehicle, and Package detection too. I’d love to just have detection without all the cloud stuff, but they’re basically inseparable now.
I honestly don’t know. It’s what they said they would do. But they also said PD would be free so who knows at this point.
Right now I use the PD Eufy offers which even includes face detection and recognition. No charge. This way I honestly don’t have to worry about what Wyze does with PD.
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