Wyze’s Cam Plus plan gets a price hike next month

Wyze security camera users who pay monthly for cloud storage, people detention, and other perks will be paying extra starting in June.

Wyze began notifying Cam Plus users this week that the monthly subscription price for the service will jump from $1.99 a month to $2.99/month starting June 20.

While that’s only a $1 monthly increase, it’s also a 50 percent price hike, not to mention yet another subscription service that’s about to cost more.

There is a way to avoid the Cam Plus price hike, however: by switching to an annual plan, which costs $20 a year. 

Meanwhile, it doesn’t appear that the $9.99-a-month Cam Plus plan for unlimited cameras will be seeing any price increases, but we’ve reached out to Wyze for confirmation. The cheaper Cam Plus plan only covers a single camera.

In its email to Cam Plus users, Wyze blamed the price increase in part on rising credit card fees, noting that a “huge portion” of monthly Cam Plus costs go toward covering the frequent credit card transactions.

Wyze also called out the cloud storage needs of 2K video cameras, as well as its “investments” in AI-powered features, such as person and sound detection.

The price hike won’t affect Cam Plus users currently in a free trial or a discounted promotional period, although the increase will kick in once the free trial or promotion ends.

Cam Plus subscribers get a range of features that aren’t provided to free users, including cloud video storage with unlimited-length event clips; person, package, vehicle, and pet detection; the ability to stream recorded videos on the web; and no cooldown between motion events.

While free Wyze users do get motion- and sound-triggered alerts from their cameras, there is a five-minute cooldown between motion alerts, and instead of cloud video storage, free users only get snapshots of motion events stored online.

There’s also the “name-your-price” Cam Plus Lite plan, which offers people detection and cloud storage for 12-second videos for whatever you want to pay, including zip.

Cam Plus Lite is an account-wide option, and you can mix and match it with a Cam Plus single-camera subscription.

That said, Cam Plus Lite only works with a limited selection of Wyze cameras, including the first three Wyze Cams, the Cam Pan v1 and v2, and the Cam Outdoor, and it doesn’t currently work with Wyze’s video doorbells.