The Wyze Cam was a success when it was first released in 2017, thanks to its low price tag and ability to record both locally and to the cloud. Wyze has introduced several more security cameras since then, and the paid subscription options have also been shuffled a few times. Now the company is changing its cloud recording plans again, with a new ‘Cam Plus Lite’ option set to replace the current free cloud recordings.
Wyze announced in a forum post, “Meet Cam Plus Lite, a service that brings you 12-second Event recordings and Wyze Person Detection at whatever price you choose, including $0. Cam Plus Lite gives you Wyze Person Detection and 12-second Event videos as often as every 5 minutes, saved in the cloud for 14 days. It will allow you to receive and filter motion Event videos with people in them to make sure the notifications you get are meaningful. This will apply to our current lineup of Wyze Cam models, no matter how many of these devices you have on your account – now or in the future.”
Cam Plus Lite provides 15-second cloud recordings instead of the 12-second recordings on the existing free recording plan, but it also restricts cloud recordings to person detection only. That’s a problem when Wyze’s person detection is still buggy, as it often fails to identify people, sometimes identifies pets or objects as people. Anything that isn’t detected as a person will be saved to the cloud as a thumbnail image only.
| Cam Plus Lite | Cam Plus | Cam Plus Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Name your price | $1.99/mo/cam $15/yr/cam |
$3.99/mo/cam $39.99/yr/cam |
| 24 x 7 Professional Monitoring |  |
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| Friendly Faces Facial Recognition | |
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| Visual Alert Notification | |
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| Person Detection | |
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| Package Detection | |
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| Vehicle Detection | |
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| Pet Detection | |
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| 2x and 4x Event Fast-Forwarding | |
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| Subscriber Discounts | |
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| Real-time Video with Live View | |
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| Event Video Length | 12 Seconds | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Cooldown between Event Recording | 5 Minutes | Back-to-Back Recordings | Back-to-Back Recordings |
| Video Events History for 14 Days | |
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| Motion-Triggered Alerts | |
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| Sound-Triggered Alerts | |
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| Smoke + CO Listener | |
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Source: Wyze on Reddit
The switchup is a bit confusing, partially because Wyze itself is still experimenting with its plans — the company says it nearly went bankrupt in 2020, and is attempting to find a balance between profitability and keeping buyers happy. Wyze also hasn’t decided if future cameras will have Cam Plus Lite as an option at all.
On the bright side, local recording is also improving. Wyze said, “We just acquired a license to an exFAT patent and will officially support microSDXC cards bigger than 32GB! This is already included on the latest Wyze Cam v3 firmware and will be coming to the rest of our cameras in their next firmware updates.” The app will also be updated with 30-second rewind and skip forward buttons when viewing local recordings “by mid-February.”
Wyze also says it will shut down cloud recordings for everyone who doesn’t move to Cam Plus Lite (or one of the paid subscriptions) starting February 15. Wyze device owners can switch to Cam Plus Lite at any date, but after that February deadline, you won’t have new cloud recordings. That seemingly means free cloud recordings are going away entirely for the original Wyze Cam, since the Cam v1 isn’t listed as a supported device for the new Cam Plus Lite.
The post Wyze replaces free cloud recording with limited “Cam Plus Lite” plan, future cameras might require paid subscription appeared first on xda-developers.
source https://www.xda-developers.com/wyze-cam-plus-lite-plan/