Ring ring! Who's there? It's the price hike police. Ring Protect Basic's monthly subscription package is set to increase from £2.50 per month to £3.49 in the UK (€3.99/$3.99 in respective EU/US regions). The annual cost will adjust in line with those prices, at £34.99/€39.99/$39.99 for the 12 month discounted package.
That's a whopping 40% increase – and it's due to commence, based on the email I received from Ring, from 1 July 2022. I get that things can't stay the same price forever, but during the current cost of living crisis – where pretty much everything keeps on leaping up in pricing demands – to have every product under Ring's stable leap by such a margin is a sizeable demand.
The price change will affect all Ring products as applicable, from its smart doorbells, to cameras and alarm systems. However, if you subscribe to Ring Protect Plus, which permits multiple Ring products to be activated under one account, then it appears that price will remain fixed at £8 per month / £80 per year ($/€10/$/€100 respectively for other regions).
Why is Ring increasing prices?
So why is Ring upping its Protect Basic subscription costs? The company puts it down to more features coming to enhance your user experience. The email I received lists the following three as the biggest reasons:
1. Extended Video Storage
Ring videos will now be stored for up to 180 days. That's almost six months. In fairness that's a lot, lot more time than the current 30 days offered (other regions may vary). You'll need to manually set this up in settings, though, as Ring will still default to 30 days.
2. Bulk Video Downloads
"Download up to 50 videos at once," reads the email. Now, I don't know about you, but I've rarely wanted to download more than one video at a time really. It's not a bad feature to offer, of course, but this sounds like a freebie upgrade, not a reason to increase pricing.
3. Discount
There's 10 percent discount on Ring.com products. But given how many amazing Ring deals you'll find across various retailers, this sounds more to me like there aren't more than two credible reasons for Ring to increase its prices.
Whether or not you think that's enough to justify the price increase, it's not going to make any difference: so make your accounting adjustments accordingly, or consider dropping to a non-recording Ring package instead and save yourself up to £41.88 per year as a result. The choice is yours.
