Regretting the amount of money I've spent

Services & Integrations
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I bought my first Cam v3 something like 6 years ago, with the intention of using it to just be able to monitor things manually (no alerts/detection/Cam Plus/ etc.). I liked it so much that I bought another one, then a couple Pan v3’s. Eventually started using them for detection/security.

I got tired of the “dumb” event notifications, so I switched to Cam Plus. Was fairly happy with it, especially since AI was fairly new and it was “learning”. Not too many complaints.

I have since purchased something like 14 cameras from Wyze to cover my property, and upgraded to Cam Unlimited to give them all service. It feels like every time I buy a new device, the service gets worse and worse.

Cameras constantly disconnecting, laggy push notifications (sometimes more than 30 seconds between the event and being notified), motion triggers activating but recording after the trigger, so nothing is actually visible in the recording, cameras with overlapping fields of view will inconsistently not be triggered by the same motion, constantly having to reset services… And with all of this, the AI seems to be getting dumber by the second. It CONSTANTLY determines that bugs or light mist are people, even the smoker on my patio is a “person” pretty often. It can’t tell the difference between a parked car and one that’s moving, sometimes trees are packages, and tonight it thought a random spider was a pet. Don’t even get me started on how incredibly bad the computer browser interface is… I might as well just sit on my roof all day and night to monitor my property with how spotty the connectivity is on that website. Over half of the cameras just refuse to connect, even when they are displaying live feeds in 1080p or higher on my phone.

I have all of the cameras on their own, high priority mesh WiFi network, shared with literally no other devices. My internet speed is 1gb/s download, upload is over 100mb/s.

I have spent, all told, something like $1,000 on hardware and services with this company over the years, and it seems like every day I am getting less and less of a return on investment; and I am starting to heavily regret it.

Wyze, PLEASE switch over to a better AI system for your Cam Plus services. Your in-house solution is absolutely awful. The camera hardware is halfway decent for the price, but there are obviously some massive issues with how data is transmitted/ how the WiFi link is established and held. Honestly you should allow the devices to compute detection stuff on-site at our properties via a base station or something. The fact that the camera has to send the images to your servers for digestion and categorization, then back to our phone is wonky and takes too long with far too many variables in transit.

In this day-and-age, where an AI assistant built in to my phone can literally generate an image from a fever dream in my mind, why can’t your system tell the difference between a gust of wind and an intruder?

Please help me be able to recommend your products to people again, as I was once proud to do.

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While I don’t have the connectivity problems you describe, I agree that the wise AI is a joke. Everything that moves is flagged as a person - vehicles, flags, tree limbs, whatever. On the camera that faces my parked car, I had to turn off vehicle hits recordings/notifications because I was getting dozens of notifications per day. And I agree, it seems to be getting worse rather than better. Mostly, I keep Cam Plus for the cloud recording.

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100% agree on all items you point out.

I have disabled vehicle detection on my driveway because every time a piece air born anything blows across the FOV I get a vehicle notification for my car that has been sitting for days. Basically to overcome the false positives for many of the cameras I use I have to zone out so much space or turn off detection items that I’ve made the camera dumb.

I also get the notifications frequently up to 30 seconds behind. Once it came in at least a minute late.

The web app is a complete waste of time to use unless you have one camera. I’m not sure why that’s an issue for them to further develop that to be usable; it’s not like its new technology.

To be honest. I don’t think their actually using AI for anything. I just think they implemented facial recognition and called it AI to put a spin on marketing. Any variation of AI would be able to tell the difference between a swinging tree limb and a person walking across the lawn (which is another issue I face). The list goes on.

Another annoyance is that sometimes the cameras will just stop recording to the SD card and it’s almost always at a time I need to see what went on. It will have video before and after the event but not during. It’s like the camera is too busy uploading the event to the cloud to write it to the SD at the same time. And the video doorbell stops recording the detected motion after seconds when the motion is still present. I have this happen all the time even though I have “no cooldown” selected.

The last issue that is over the top bad is that I had the door bell module catch fire at my remote house. Fortunately only it and about a 2ft diameter of the wall was messed up. But the unit is completely melted, socket has to get replaced and wall repaired. I got real lucky on that. And I know that things happen with electrical but It just seems like I have to keep dialing back my expectations with Wyze.

If I had to guess I think that the issue is that their selling a product (speaking of hardware) at a fairly discounted price compared to competitors so their having to make up for that lost revenue by cutting design efforts and compute resources at whatever cloud provider their at. I would rather pay a little more for the hardware and get good software/cloud services to be honest.

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Wyze does not do product designs; they buy complete products and slaps their own/modified firmware.

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I was speaking of software/firmware design.

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I completely agree. I came here to see if others were experiencing the same issue, and it is clear they are. I remember buying their first camera soon after it was released. For such an inexpensive price, I was thoroughly impressed. I also recall that they cared about their customers back then. Ever since they brought in investors, it seems they have forgotten about us and are only focused on keeping the investors happy.

I currently own 12 cameras (v1-4, OG Pan and Panv3), and subscribe to CamPlus. While I am not ready to move away from their products yet, I have been planning it for some time. I have wired most of my home with network cable and only need to finish a few more areas so I can switch to a NVR/PoE system similar to what I installed at my old house. I hate reparing sheetrock, which is why I’m dragging arse on completeing it, and I refuse to pay someone to do it.. I am tired of paying for features that are not useful and supporting a company that has lost its way.

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They say “misery loves company” and in this case, it is some comfort to know that we are not alone. We purchased our first cameras years ago. As newer cameras became available, I bought more, thinking that the service would improve over the years. I regret investing so much in so many cameras considering there has been no improvement in the false alerts—cobwebs are people; the sun going behind a cloud is a person; tree branches swaying in the breeze are people and on and on… no improvement at all in years. Factor in the nonstop alerts for our parked vehicles and there are so many needless notifications, they render notifications nearly useless.

Several years ago, someone described these cameras as “toys”. Sad to say, we have come to that same conclusion. No more cameras for us. We haven’t unsubscribed from CamPlus yet, because Unlimited is a good deal and the cameras sometimes work.

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Also several minutes ago.

Someone is persistent. :wink:

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Do you know how old he is? :rofl:

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Old enough to know better? :rofl:

He’s still pretty spry. :kangaroo:

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Dug up this old chestnut to stay on topic. :slight_smile:

 

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I don’t get that reference or how it pertains to me.

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He’s not referring to you. And he’s kidding.

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Ok, thanks!

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Obviously you are new. Nobody around here takes @peepeep seriously most of the time :rofl:

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