topic Re: Subscription and poor support in Arlo Ultra

Subscription and poor support

Deman666 — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 01:44:41 GMT

Bit of a comment for those surfing communities before they buy. I purchased a set of Ultra cameras for a second property after using two Arlo Pro's. I would recommend after the experience to not buy these for a number of reasons. The central being the pricing for subscription and poor level of customer service.

Hardware: Works well enough but the ability to remote view motion detected incidents like my Arlo Pro cameras required a subscription. This makes them very expensive dumb cameras without.

Subscription: I tried to activate the free 1 year trial and after calls to support they requested me to set up my pro's and ultras on different accounts and a number of other silly steps. It was clear they had no way of working in their own IT to set my account to use free option. I eventually just paid. It all works well enough but AI part is very basic without any real value add and the cost for cloud storage expensive and not worth it.

Support: I don't live in the US so it was chat or call - I eventually called (not easy in my timezone) as no email contacts (that I could find). Support person was nice enough. After the call ticket opened but I would reply to ticket with no answer and a very klugey process of 'you have not replied, we will close your ticket', writing up responses to get 'error' in the web UI, continued no ticket responses, no automated email that they had received my response. Guys, if you have an enterprise customer support system pay someone to set it up for you correctly - if you don't, buy one. Your Netgear so you must have SFDC or something?

Over all these are very expensive camera's, the batterie system convenient but the move from Pro to Ultra a downgrade of never ending expense. I would avoid the same purchase.

Re: Subscription and poor support

StephenB — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 15:00:28 GMT

@Deman666 wrote:

Hardware: Works well enough but the ability to remote view motion detected incidents like my Arlo Pro cameras required a subscription.

It is possible to set up direct access to local storage (which does not require a subscription). https://kb.arlo.com/000062337/What-is-Direct-Storage-Access-and-how-do-I-use-it

There are some constraints - you lose thumbnails, and if you grant access to another account they will not see your recordings.

Re: Subscription and poor support

JamesC — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 17:05:33 GMT

Deman666,

I apologize for the poor initial experience. Did you originally purchase the system in the same country in which it is being used? Was this a brand new sealed Arlo Ultra kit?

JamesC

Re: Subscription and poor support

Deman666 — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 09:35:43 GMT

That’s correct James

Re: Subscription and poor support

Deman666 — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 09:39:02 GMT

Thanks for the reply Stephan! Yes this feature just shipped(Not available when I purchased) but currently requires port forwarding or VPN and loses Notifications to others (that iI use) and is not a friendly experience. Long way of the Pro experience.

Re: Subscription and poor support

StephenB — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 12:02:05 GMT

@Deman666 wrote:
Yes this feature just shipped(Not available when I purchased) but currently requires port forwarding or VPN and loses Notifications to others (that iI use) and is not a friendly experience. Long way of the Pro experience.

It is a start, but I agree it needs more work.