I was disappointed when Wyze made the decision to convert Can Plus Lite to a legacy/grandfathered status. I understand they probably decided to do this because it was bleeding money with few paying for it. I also think they should’ve made the change more openly instead of silently. I only learned about it because someone linked me to a support article last year saying it would no longer be available to sign up for, though those who had it could keep it.
Personally, I would guess you’re out of luck. However, I can think of 1 potential workaround and depending on your timeline and evidence we could try throwing your case at the mercy of some higher up who may (or may not) have special discretion (there’s a chance the CPLite code is locked up in some more advanced way…I say this from experience working for other companies where even as a supervisor it was impossible to try to use grandfathered codes that were totally banned no matter what).
Timeline mercy attempt: give me a detailed timeline with dates:
- When did you purchase
- What page on the Wyze domain told you CPLite was still available? (I can go get the evidence off the Internet archive wayback machine even if it’s no longer there currently)
- When did you activate your cameras?
- When did you finally get around to trying to get CPLite and find out it’s no longer available?
As I said, if you have a strong enough case, we can try throwing it before some higher-ups in charge of subscriptions and see if there is any discretionary option available to them (there may not be).
And while I’m willing to make that effort for you, I think they are most likely to treat it the same way cell phone or TV companies I worked for would treat the same situation when I worked for some of those and we had people who called in wanting a grandfathered plan that was available and no longer is. [Back when I worked for Sprint in the '00’s] I once talked to a guy who bought cell phones [it might’ve even been during a promotional period] but then didn’t activate them on the plan for several months [it might’ve even been more than a year]. When he finally went to add the subscription to the hardware, the plan was grandfathered and no longer existed and new signups could only go on the new plan. He pointed out that the old plan was available back when he bought the phones, he just hadn’t gotten around to activating them yet, and now wanted the grandfathered plan that wasn’t offered anymore, but there was nothing anyone could do for him because it was available when he ordered them, but not when he asked to sign up/activate the subscription. I suspect that’s the same thing here, that it was available when you bought it, but then you took too long to sign up and now it’s been grandfathered and is unavailable. But it can’t hurt to try since Wyze wants one of their core values to be to treat users as friends. So get me as much of your timeline details as possible and I’ll give it a try in some back channels.
Having said that, there is a potential workaround that wouldn’t need Wyze’s permission that I would personally do if I was in your shoes (which is not the same thing as me recommending that you should actually do this…I am only telling you how my problem solving loophole mind works to think up out of the box solutions… Wyze would certainly not recommend you do this, and I am not endorsing it). Of your own volition, you could go search for posts on here, or Reddit, X, etc for people who are venting about how they’re ditching all their Wyze stuff for some other company. I would then direct message some of those people, ask them if they had cam plus lite on their account, and if so, would they be willing to change the account email and password to some third party temporary email address, then turn over the credentials for that account to you, then when you log in, you could change the account information to your regular credentials (You would also have to change your current wise account email to a different email address so it’s not conflicting when you try to add that email to the new account you just got transferred over to you). You I mean, if somebody left Wyze and isn’t going to use their account at all anymore, if they were grandfathered into CPLite, you could actually get it that way. I, personally, would offer said person don’t kind of gratuity for selling their former account and grandfathered plan to you since they won’t be using or needing it anymore. -One risk to this is what happens if the person eventually ever decides they want to come back (maybe Wyze finally offers RTSP, Matter, home assistant, or implements any of a million other wishlist requests they were upset and left over)? What if they try to tell security someone hacked and stole their old account and changed the credentials? Lots of risks with this workaround if you don’t make sure to keep a lot of evidence in writing… And even if you prove you didn’t commit a crime, what about violating the Terms of Service against sharing or selling accounts? Naw, too much risk in all that IMO. Overall, I don’t recommend it.
FWIW, I have and use CPLite on one of my accounts, but I don’t really care much about the short cloud events since I can still record everything and watch everything on an SD card with no limitations or cool down, etc. The only great thing about CPLite is the ability to have person detection in the notifications and filter events for those that had a person in them. Other than that, the SD card works better IMO.
And if free person detection is what you’re desperate for, without requiring a subscription, there are alternative solutions you could explore, including Tiny Cam Pro (if you use Android), or some various RTSP converters to send the live stream through another program that does free person detection (the most popular way of doing this is currently waiting for a TUTK bug fix though…).
Anyway, for now, if you get me a detailed timeline, I’ll pass on your info to someone, but I make no other promises other than that I will make sure an employee gets eyes on it. It can’t hurt to try.