It’s up and running now.
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If the locally processed “AI” / person detection features weren’t already available on several other very cheap cameras, this would all be fairly understandable because the tech must be impossibly difficult. But they are, so it isn’t. They could have replaced Xnor.
To be in this position now where chunks of Wyze become donationware, this just tells me that they “chose poorly”. They COULD have bought or written a substitute for Xnor to run locally. They did not. They figured they could handle the load on their Amazon cloud servers. Tight genius code is hard or expensive. They took an easier quick fix path. They cheaped out. They weren’t smart. And now they have to ask customers to pay for it.
I’ve gotten great value out of these very inexpensive cameras. Running a forum alone costs money, let alone storing dozens of video clips per customer per day. But this sounds like a bad place to build upon much further. Wyze has let their focus get distracted in so many different ways it’s not funny. Scales and thermometers and MLM programs and space heaters… Sigh. Guys, people came here for the cool tech. And you should have always had a simple cloud fee structure in place from Day 1.
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I was going to make this same comment - could you tell us “If everyone we promised free service to gave us just $___ per month, that would cover our costs.” Then everyone can decide what they can afford, and pay nothing if they really can’t afford it.
Also, as someone else said, if the false detections could be reduced, that would sure help on the cloud costs…
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What? This is the first I’m hearing about Wyze and MLM programs and space heaters. Can you elaborate?
I feel like I’m in a small minority that has never really used person detection (turned off xnor.ai after a week and tried the cam plus trial but don’t plan on resubscribing). None of them have worked with the sense triggered events (motion sensors mostly) which is what I use exclusively to notify and create cloud events.
I can quickly jump to the correct spot in the timeline of my SD cards for motion detected and it has much fewer false alerts and a much lower cooldown. If I dont have a tonne of false alerts I don’t really need a person filter.
I just reviewed the last two days of events from my most active V2 and out of 39 events, 38 had people the other one was a garbage truck. No bugs, no false alerts.
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A few days ago a product manger for wyze asked about a heater What do you think of A Space Heater
As for the multi level marketing. That’s probably in reference to the affiliate program they tried to push for their overstock of paper surgical masks. Wyze
Saying they are distracted is a polite way of putting it.
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I do not like the idea of a monthly payment of any kind…which is why I did not go with SimpliSafe or many others out there. I do understand that cloud storage costs, but there should be some option of redirect instead of the cloud…or a round about approach (cloud, then it auto redirects to local storage to remove it from cloud storage). Yes, I also know there are some transaction cost for cloud as well, but very minimal. This needs to be figured out for, at least, the people who are willing to learn how to get to their own footage locally.
I love the cameras, I love the fact the company continues to grow and develop new items at a great cost.
But, please…don’t start putting the company in the same category as other companies with monthly charges when you are so far ahead of them.
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I am kind of surprised that Wyze didn’t try to think more outside the box on how to replace XNor.ai.
Sure, they don’t have enough horsepower on the main camera, without a lot of smart coding, which is why XNor.ai was bought out.
But surely Wyze could have done something like created a plug-in bridge, like they did for the the Wyze sensor product.
Call it the “Plug-In Person Detector”.
It would have a 2nd CPU along with the USB connector, just like their bridge did.
The main CPU could do the initial detection of motion, perhaps even “motion + kind of looks like a human”.
Then it sends the video feed over USB to the 2nd CPU which can process the video feed to do a better detection scheme.
They already have the design of this plug-in with their bridge, just swap out the zigbee (like) radio, and put in a secondary cpu instead.
They could have turned around and had 2 options:
Pay a monthly Cloud fee of X.
Pay a one time fee to get the “Plug-In Person Detector” bridge, which probably could have been made for 10 bucks or so.
(I say 10 bucks, because they charge 5 bucks for the zigbee/sensor bridge right now. Doubling that should get them a cpu that could finish the processing job)
I would have been more than happy to pay that 1 time fee to get the extra CPU/processing power.
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That’s kind of brilliant. I think your costs are off but it’s a great idea.
I believe these opportunity costs will determine the upper limit of what people will consider donating.
What do other similar systems with similar features cost right now? Then figure that the Wyze selling point has been “disruptively inexpensive”.
So we better hope that enough customers feel motivated to pay whatever that monthly amount would be for Wyze to continue to offer AI person detection…
And hope the rest of the business model is more solid, or else we won’t be getting much else from them either…
Absolutely on both points!!
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It’s too bad you can’t pay for services with google play credit. I always have credit from google opinion rewards surveys that I use on useless stuff before the credit expires. I would use that to pay for wyze services in a heartbeat.
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As a matter of time interest what is the cost per camera for providing person detection in the cloud?
I am sure users will want to know this when they are deciding how much to pay to keep their PD detection sustainable.
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If CMC is $1.50/camera, person detection by itself should be less than that.
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If Wyze is going to charge a subscription fee, then the function being paid for needs to work, work correctly, and work reliably all the time. Unfortunately, even as a fan of Wyze, I can’t say many of the products and services have met that standard. Other than the basic functions of the camera, The forum is full of problems with camera notifications, Wyze Sense going offline, Camera triggers failing to activate bulbs and switches, basically any of the cloud based functions have been pretty buggy. I don’t know how much of the Wyze Lock is server based, but that product has also been buggy for people also.
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I’m a bit put off by this Nov. 26, 2019 date. I got my first cam at the end of December, 2019. Within a month, I was so impressed, I soon had 5 cams and a wide array of Wyze peripherals. A key feature for me with the cams was the free person detection. When the deal with X ended, I was quick to be a PD beta tester and frankly, I’m mostly satisfied with it. But now I’m feeling a bit slighted because I bought in a month too late. I bought these cams under the assumption there would be no fees for the stated features. I don’t like subscriptions of any kind. I feel the same as @carverofchoice, in that those of us who started with Wyze after Nov. 26, 2019 be treated the same as those who came before… up to the date this announcement. I, and those in my situation expected free PD as much as those who were pre-Nov 26. Otherwise, I’m a very happy customer.
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The shine of Wyze is starting to tarnish. I wish you would stop with the thermometers masks scales and just concentrate on quality products. The software on these cameras is still buggy. Sensors and bulbs disconnect too often. Way too many false alerts. Fix the false alerts and that will cut down your processing needs. Tell us what it costs to break even on the person detection.
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I can’t stress enough that knowing the cost per camera incurred by Wyze will greatly influence my decision when choosing to pay what I want.
I would also LOVE RTSP support for Wyze so I can handle all of my face/person/motion detection on my local network. There are plenty of open source tools that I could use to repurpose a raspberry pi or an old laptop to monitor my cameras. Plus, with Sonoff entering the $25 camera market while supporting RTSP, it would be a wise move.
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Yep. Feel the same way if I am going to have to pay a few bucks for each camera I might as well went with nest and ponied up the $$ out of the gate. These cameras are cool for $20-30 but there are way too many hassles and even with a video card the play back is spotty at best. I just bought 8 light bulbs to replace Wink bulbs when Wink announced they were going to a subscription. Sounds like a mistake after only 3 weeks. Probably only a matter of time before Wyze has to do the same. The fact that all of the launches are pre pay tells me 100% they are strapped for cash. I prepaid for the outdoor cam but I think that may be the last of my Wyze purchases. I don’t think I will be spending anymore on Wyze products. Not to mention the whole sensor line is a waste of time and money.
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They do have an RTSP firmware, the problem is, is that it is pretty flaky after you try more than 1 or 2 cams.
PS: They also have a Web Cam firmware, which can be used to connect to a Raspberry Pi over USB…
(I tested it, and you could run at least 2-3 Cams per Pi 4, if you wanted, and had a long enough USB cable for each cam. And since you got Ethernet on the Pi, you just turned these cams into hardwired cams instead of Wifi)
It would be an ideal solution for me, except that it doesn’t support the Night Mode/IR stuff. So it doesn’t work at all at night.
Otherwise, the deal would have been done for me right there.
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