Are you like me and buying a Ring Alarm System for your home because it offers the most affordable professional 24/7 monitoring at just $10 per month or $100 per year? Then I hope you (like me) just received an email stating that you will be paying twice as much starting with your next renewal.
That’s the top of an email I received a few hours ago, telling me that starting in March I’d be paying $20 a month or $200 a year, matching the price of the Ring Protect Pro plan that Amazon started selling three years ago. I’ve used Ring Protect Plus before:
Price increases are always annoying, but I think Ring is still a relatively affordable alarm service. Here’s the real outrage: Amazon pretends it’s responsible enough to warn regular customers that this is about to happen.
“This is a reminder we notified you before,” I read the first line of Ring’s email to me today. when? I certainly don’t remember getting an email telling me the price had increased by 100%…
But after digging around on the company’s website, I did find an FAQ with the answer: “September 2021, We sent you an email letting you know that your Ring Protect Plus (1st Gen) subscription will be moving to the new plan starting in 2025.
So, of course, I looked through my emails from September 2021, and in it I found an email from Ring… which stated Nothing has changed except my plan name.
Seriously, take a look at this part of the email titled “Important: Your plan name has changed”:
Oh, but there’s that little footnote marker. See the number 1 at the end of the sentence? This results in a dark gray fine print section at the bottom of the email, which states:
In fact, every year I look back at my boring Ring renewal emails, I have this fine print at the bottom of every email. Basically, Amazon has been implementing dark mode for its Ring customers for three years now. If I hadn’t taken Amazon’s word for it that nothing had changed, maybe I would have switched to a different alarm system. I guess it’s not too late yet…
In fact, Ring may be giving some of them a dark pattern treatment again today. Some customers said their emails about price increases began like this: “New name. New features. Same great price,” Then go on to describe how features or pricing will change significantly.
I was angry because I was over the barrel. Do I really want to tear out and replace my hardwired Ring Doorbell? Will I really let my home insurance alarm discount lapse? But I do understand the price increase to some extent. Inflation happened, and regular Ring customers like me have enjoyed low prices for years.
Amazon’s Ring did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
