Ring Just Hiked Prices 40%! What ‘Protect Basic’ Customers Need To Know – New Video

The Ring Protect Basic used to be pretty good value – for £2.50 (or $3) per month, you had cloud-based recordings and a bunch of extra features. But on 1st June 2022, Ring announced that they were hiking the price of this plan by up to 40%.

Why did they do this? Are there any alternatives to Ring? Or can you just go subscription-fee with Ring? I answer all these questions, and more, in today’s video:

The individual sections of this video are:

  • 0:00 – Intro
  • 1:33 – New features for the Protect Basic plan
  • 1:55 – Not the only (big) price increase from Ring
  • 2:29 – Alternatives: what you could do instead
  • 3:32 – Wrapping Up

Some links to points I mention in this video are below:

Video Transcript

Hello, I’m Tristan. When a company emails you and starts by saying “over the last few years, we’re proud of what we’ve built and we can’t WAIT to deliver loads of new features to you”… you know you’re about to get screwed.

And that’s exactly what Ring did yesterday. Their most popular Protect Basic plan is going up by 33 to 40% depending on where you live (with the UK and Europe tending to see 35-40% price hikes). What’s more, they’re only giving us one month’s notice of this change.

Protect Basic used to cost £2.50 per month or £25 a year in the UK, but now it’ll cost £3.50 per month or £35 per year. In America it used to be $3 per month or $30 per year, but this is rising to $4 per month or $40 per year. Whilst $1 more per month might not SOUND like much, remember that this plan is PER DEVICE, meaning that if you have three Ring devices, it’ll cost you an EXTRA $3 per month or $30 per year.

And if you decide not to pay anymore, you lose a bunch of features. Your recordings won’t be saved at all, you lose out on improved notifications, you won’t get snapshot captures, and you can’t download or share footage either. I cover this more in another video, but for most Ring customers, going subscription-free probably won’t be an option.

So, why are Ring doing this? Well, their blog post mentions how they haven’t increased the price in quite a few years, and since then they have delivered many new features. Plus they plan to add new features to the Protect Basic plan, including custom alerts, sound detection, a 10% discount on Ring.com and more. This revised plan will also store all video clips for up to 6 months (180 days), an increase from 60 days in America and 30 days in the UK and Europe. That’s a decent set of new features.

However it’s also ANOTHER pretty annoying change by Ring. Last year they DOUBLED the subscription price for Ring Alarm customers (those with cellular backup and professional monitoring used to pay $10 per month, but Ring doubled this to $20 per month). It also comes hot on the heels of Wyze hiking up their own subscription fees, which makes me cynically think that some business person at Ring seized the opportunity to hike up their own fees. In their mind, there’s one less competitor to worry about, after all.

If you’re unhappy about Ring hiking up their fees 40% in a month’s time, what are your options? Well, there’s four main options. One – stick with it. You could argue that the Ring Protect Basic plan is still decent value for £35 (or $40) per year, and you could just keep paying. Alternatively, you could upgrade to the Ring Protect PLUS plan – this costs £80 (or $100) per year but covers an unlimited number of devices, plus it gives an extended warranty on qualifying devices. Your third option is to STICK IT TO THE MAN and cancel the Ring Protect plan entirely, and monitor your cameras yourself whenever you get a notification. This option doesn’t work for me (I have to sleep, after all!), but it might work for you. Finally, you could move to a competitor. Eufy offers better recording quality than Ring, and they DO store your recordings without requiring a monthly subscription. Blink and Wyze are also good options, although there has been some recent controversy about Wyze’s subscription changes. I also quite like Annke and Reolink, who both offer lots of features for free.

For now I’m going to stick with Ring, especially since I have the Protect Plus plan and this hasn’t increased in price, but it’s only a matter of time before they hike this up too. But what about you? Are you going to leave Ring behind? Let me know in the comments below.

And that pretty much wraps up today’s video. I’ll put more information and links down in the description which cover some of Ring’s competitors in more detail. Other than that, if you liked this video, please click the thumbs up button which will tell YouTube that more people should see this video. Please also consider subscribing to my channel and clicking the bell icon which will notify you when I release new videos. Thank you!

About Tristan Perry

Tristan Perry is a software developer who is passionate about tech gadgets, DIY and housing. He has therefore loved seeing smart homes hit the mainstream. Tristan also has an academic background (in Math & Computer Science), and so he enjoys digging into the technical ways that smart home devices work.

Tristan owns close to a dozen Amazon Echo devices, way too many Philips Hue bulbs and lightstrips, a boat-load of Ring Cameras and Doorbells... and a bunch of other smart home devices too (from Reolink, Google Nest, GLEDOPTO and others).

If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions about this article, please leave a comment below. Please note that all comments go into a moderation queue (to prevent blog spam). Your comment will be manually reviewed and approved by Tristan in less than a week. Thanks!

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