You should’ve had an option for “I already pay for Cam Plus and would continue to do that instead, but I think it’s a good idea so other people can choose to OPT IN to it if they want it for free (as long as it is completely optional and not forced on anyone), so Wyze can continue to live their mission of making great tech affordable to everyone if they want it.”
I’m afraid the current options don’t fully apply to me…but “I wouldn’t opt in but don’t mind having the option” is probably closest to that. I just don’t want it to sound like I wouldn’t opt in because I don’t like the idea, but instead wouldn’t opt in because I would already be paying for it, so there is no need to opt in…but I am highly supportive of this option and saying “I wouldn’t opt in but I don’t mind having the option” significantly underemphasizes how awesome I think this could be, consider you’re only thinking of things like non-intrusive banner ads (no pop-up or blocking videos, etc). I think that’s fantastic for an OPTIONAL offering.
Thoughts:
I assume it would be more like Cam Plus Unlimited in the sense that it would cover every camera? It seems it would be too hard for you to choose which individual cameras had banners and which didn’t, so it would be easier to give it to all or none instead.
What if someone pays for a single cam plus license on 1 camera, but then opts in for all the other cameras? Would the paid license have any benefits over the others? Would the paid license UI also be subjected to ads even though it’s a paid license just because the others require the ads now? If so, what would be the point in paying for individual licenses in that case?
To answer about whether Banner ads are worth it, I would say “Absolutely” as long as it is optional. Allow people to use the app without ads, or opt in to pay for those extra features that have ongoing costs for you, or allow people to pay to have services with no ads. As long as those 3 options are available and ads are not forced, I 100% support it and believe it is fully in line with your core value of finding new creative ways to make great tech affordable to everyone.
I think your messaging just needs to be really clear. For example, for Cam Plus Lite, you could explain it like:
" We deprecated CPLite a while ago because too many people choose not to pay anything for it, but lots of people loved it, and we loved being able to provide this technology to our users, we just couldn’t afford it at no cost when the cloud expenses were costing us so much. We’ve found a way to resolve this! We will make ad-funded CPlite totally optional. Users can also pay to have an ad free experience instead since they would then be covering their own costs instead."
I assume this means that CPLite would then also be expanded to cover newer cams finally (ie: for those who opt in to the ad version)? That would be pretty cool. But it might upset people grandfathered in the old version. You might need to rename it to make sure there is a distinction, or people who previously had it with no ads will be upset to have that suddenly changed on them. I would find a way to ensure that those on the grandfathered version probably keep the status quo, and the ad version is somehow seen as a separate and new version that includes new cameras too, otherwise it potential to be a PR nightmare, which would make it not worthwhile and you should instead just leave CPLite as it is and only do ads for Cam Plus. That might be safer.
I think your above screenshots of the prototype look great to me. If I didn’t have a paid subscription I would almost definitely do it. I can pretty much guarantee my brothers and my parents would absolutely sign up for this ad version if it gave Cam Plus features!
From my part, even though I have the full subscriptions, I would actually feel a lot better about recommending Wyze to people who don’t have them yet, and even gifting Wyze devices to friends/family knowing they could still get full use out of them fairly unobtrusive ads. So you would probably get more referrals [from me] if this was an option. The above ads aren’t bad at all IMO. I think you did a great job finding a creative solution to cover your costs while offering the option.
The only potential downsides I see are that it may slightly cause some people to psychologically view Wyze as less classy. It will also be used against Wyze in reviews and complaints for the people who think they have to announce their departure and want to pile on Post Hoc Rationalization (Confabulation), Confirmation Bias, Negativity Bias, Availability Heuristic, Sunk Cost Fallacy, Hindsight Bias, Motivated Reasoning, etc. Trolls will use it as ammo to try to make it look less classy even if it’s totally optional and only adds extra features that have ongoing costs. I don’t think this concern outweighs the benefits and adding to your core values of finding ways to help make things more widely available to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it, especially as an option, but I might as well mention it is something worth considering.
Overall, I am HIGHLY very supportive of this as long as you make it totally optional and have it mostly focussed on things that actually have ongoing costs to you (such as cloud costs) and don’t expand it too much to things don’t have ongoing costs to you just to try to pressure more people into agreeing to it unnecessarily. With that in mind, I hope you do it!
Excellent thoughts here! A lot of really good things to thing about.
We have only done a few financial models here, but yes the hope would be to make it account based and not camera based so that we can keep it really simple, but not sure there is enough ad money to support that yet. From our early explorations, the financials make sense if we can find strategic partners like Home Depot or insurance companies who might be willing to pay more for a security minded audience instead of just filling the ads with an ad network from Google or Amazon.
You’re right, the poll needed another option for subscribers…
Yes, Cam Plus Lite would have to be built for the newer cameras. This is a significant amount of engineering work, so we would need some data to prove the model first.
If you told me that as a legacy subscriber of Cam Plus Lite at $0 that in the future I could continue to pay nothing but would begin to be served ads I would accept that without complaint.
If I’m paying any amount for anything I don’t want to see ads.
Would app use and other customer data be shared with advertisers?
The opening page screenshot shows an acceptable HD sponsor logo/emblem. The other 2 screenshots show an ad whose size is too big and unacceptable for a Wyze camera ui page. Great idea to pursue to expand the user base by offering a service many would want to have and use.
Good luck with the idea and your pursuit. I would vote in the affirmative when an official poll is released.
Cam Plus Lite ‘Name-your-price-including-$0’ was presented as an experiment from the outset - though many may not remember that. Adjusting the offering for viability after years of free service is more than reasonable.
I like that Wyze proposes and attempts unorthodox stuff with the business. It sets them apart from their peers.
Later on, after it was more publicly launched they indicated the new experiment would be in seeing if they would cover enough costs to expand it to other devices:
I think that experiment mostly failed though since they decided not only to not expand it to future devices, but also to grandfather/deprecate it to not be available to new users anymore. This implies they were unable to cover enough cost with user contributions (ie: too many people decided not to contribute).
This seems like a good alternative which would allow it to continue and expand while getting the costs covered.
Having said that, they do risk some backlash if they make all people on CPLite have ads when many have gone years without ads. Wyze would be within their rights to do that, but it could hurt their reputation. I think it would be better to let people keep what they have with CPLite right now, and call the Expanded version something else. If people want the cloud events and Person Detection on the NEW cameras, then they can “upgrade” off of CPLite to the new version with ads that includes newer cameras. That way nobody feels like their expectations were broken. There are probably lots of people who bought a bunch more V3’s, etc with the expectation they would continue to keep the same functionality. Changing that to something many may see as a downgrade after it’s no longer possible to return their purchase would be frowned upon at the very least. So I would try to keep it either grandfathered or distinct from the new ad offering that includes new cameras.
If I were Wyze I would probably start there, then if that experiment is successful, and their financial analysis implies they can support more, then they can upgrade the ad service to give full Cam Plus instead.
That’s probably how I’d do it to ensure minimal risk (both socially and financially) while maximizing potential value offering.
The main rationales for skipping CPLite entirely and starting straight with offering Cam Plus for ads is that it avoids the CPLite complications and makes a bigger initial market impact with more tech articles remarking on it for greater exposure and excitement right from the start. That could certainly be worth it.
It will be interesting to see what Dave decides to do. I think it has some great, exciting potential and may bring in new users who want AI functionality but don’t want to pay for it. People might not care so much about Edge/Local AI detections in competitors as much if they can get it and ongoing AI updates free here anyway. There is still a benefit to Edge AI, but it would be slightly diminished in many user’s eyes because they don’t really care where it comes from, just whether the functionality exists.
Definitely some interesting potential here. I love that Wyze considers creative things that others aren’t doing and helps drive the market to compete more.
Yeah, just gotta be careful not to be too aggressive with the advertisements, or else you’ll have people end up calling it Spam Plus and/or Spam Plus Lite.
I think it’s an interesting concept, and I’m really glad to see a cofounder actively soliciting input from the community. I’d really like to see more of this type of engagement, because demonstrating that Wyze is listening speaks toward the idea of being friends with users.
Something I haven’t yet seen mentioned in this topic is the potential for advertisements within Wyze Web View. Since access to Web View is included with Cam Plus and since I would expect Web View users to have more screen real estate to spare, I’d be interested in learning more about Wyze’s proposals for handling that part of the service. I won’t pretend to speak for anyone else in the community, but if I could get access to Web View features at the cost of a few ads, then I’d be much more willing to do that than have ads taking up space inside the app or potentially interfering with my use of the mobile device app in any way.
FWIW, I’m currently trying Cam (Plus) Unlimited with 8-12 active cams paying month-to-month and I’m not unhappy at $10 mo so far (can go as low as ~7.50 mo as an introductory SPECIAL offer pre-paid at $89 for a year.)
No ads.
I am curious to know the rationale of those who voted (or believe):
I am not one of these people, but I believe I can fairly accurately steelman their point of view to reasonably speak in their behalf:
Privacy concerns: Allowing ads leads people to feel that there is an increased amount of tracking their data, etc.
User Experience: Many people fear that introducing ads, even as an option, could gradually lead to more intrusive advertising practices that will eventually diminish the quality of their own experience. It becomes a slippery slope and more and more things will get paywalled and put behind ad requirements until it just frustrates them to feel like they have to either pay or use ads to get a reasonable experience. Whereas if that never starts, the risk is lower.
Ad Fatigue is real. People already feel bombarded, and even though this would be optional, they would have to continue to hear about the benefits they’d get from doing it themselves. It’s just easier to not have it start and not get pushed to try it out.
It’s not uncommon for ad networks to lead to the possibility of malicious ads or malware or the code for it added to an app having added vulnerabilities which could impact them even if they aren’t using or seeing the ads. It’s just easier for them to feel safer not having it exist at all. Any code changes are likely to add increased potential for more bugs, and this feels like a needless code change to them that might cause them to experience bugs even though they don’t use the service at all, and that doesn’t feel fair to them.
Social Perception…they may feel reasonably confident telling people that they have/use Wyze, but if the name starts to be degraded in certain ways, people may feel less proud of that or afraid others may make assumptions about their choice.
It seems like they shouldn’t mind if they don’t plan to use it and thus it doesn’t seem like it should impact them (this is how I mostly feel), BUT many of them will point out that even if they don’t use it, it still will or could impact them. I think some of the above rationales are actually fairly reasonable reasons for people to choose to vote against it even when it is “optional”.
I like and agree with pretty much everything you wrote above.
The only thing I can add is some users have complained about issues moving cameras from Cam Plus to Lite. Wyze might want to be mindful of introducing a new ad supported service with the hope of Not creating more problems moving cameras between services.
In my simple opinion: That’s a big NO for me. These types of apps are for using the product, and there’s already enough stuff that requires screen space, unless we have to start get Boom Phones (you know, like the old Boom Boxes). We have enough scrolling to do right now with all the features. I recently posted regarding why you (Wyze) were putting your own ads on top of the Home Monitoring widget, which completely defeated the purpose of quickly checking the status of the product. The current Unlimited Cam Plus is very reasonable. If you made it optional, that’s great, but I wouldn’t do it.
Cam Plus or Cam Unlimited? Not worth it to me. A “few banner ads around the app”? How many is that? Once on opening the app? Every screen? What one person sees as few, another sees as too many. I’ve also found companies often have a different definition of ads than I do. As well as a difference concept of intrusive and usability.
Of the three screenshots, I found the first (Dave’s Home) and third (Front Porch) highly intrusive. That’s a lot of screen devoted to an ad. It feels like it hampers the usability of the app.
Privacy concerns, the possibility of leading to more and more intrusive ads, ad fatigue, and the possibility of malicious ads or malware are all reasons for my “Wyze shouldn’t even think about this” vote.
I am frequently prompted to subscribe to Cam Plus when I try to filter events … even though I subscribe to Cam Unlimited. That tends to lessen my trust that opting out would be reliable.
