As I was sitting at home writing an email I heard coughing. Lots and lots of coughing. Popping up my home.nest.com web interface to see out front I was presented with a request to upgrade my house to the new Nest Aware subscription.
Unlike the old subscription model, all items in the house appear to be included at one price. My current 3-camera setup would save $50 a year and get 30 days of event history as opposed to the five I currently get.
The whole thing doesn’t appear to be particularly well done at the moment. Links to how are the plans different take you to a generic Nest FAQ page that doesn’t appear to contain that.
There’s no text anywhere about what happens to your existing account – such as can I simply apply the roughly $100 I have left for the subscription to the upgraded plan.
Rolling the dice and hoping they’ve got the back end in place better than the front. Even the “view payment history” goes to the wrong landing page.
As I finally got through the updated subscription page, as hacking and wheezing from outside kept getting louder (nah, I’d already checked on my 80 year old cheap pot smoking source of the coughing… cheap cheap weed) I was presented with another couple of features of the new Nest Aware: Sound detection, and emergency calling.
These may have been introduced prior to this but news to me.
The upgrade from Nest Aware to the new Nest Aware appears to have gone fine. We’ll see on the billing cycle.
I haven’t seen this announced, but it’s probably somehow slipped through my email in the pandemic and all. Single pricing makes me want to grab another couple of cameras.
After a little digging it appears the new $60 a year Nest Aware plan only records when something triggers it so if you’ve got a gelatinous cube slowly oozing in it might not fire off because it’s too slow. There is a $120 a year plan that involves 24/7 recording.
And for the third update to the piece, google announced it today on their blog… I just missed it.
And for the fourth update:
The Nest speakers can be turned into listeners for smoke detectors. Does not appear that any of the Google Minis or Homes can, at least on my app. Edit 5 – evidently they will be able to per https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9681286 but they’re not showing anything at the moment
