Arlo OG cameras

[NoArlo007]

I’m not looking for help.  I am here to vent.  I’m a longtime Arlo customer and my cameras haven’t been recording for weeks.  Prior to that, my arlo doorbell kept going off for no reason at all.  No animals, no people, no spiders or other vermin setting off the cameras.  I’m literally talking every 10 seconds.  So much so, that I had to turn off notifications.  A surveillance company that doesn’t notify you at all OR notifies you too much should probably be out of business, no? These are the two main reasons you wouldn’t invest in a security system at all.  Oh and BTW, I’m not a Arlo Secure subscriber.   AND, I’m not a technophobe.  I genuinely used to love technology.  Used to.  

My experience with this entire ecosystem is the main reason I, and many others, are so jaded on technology.  I invested in this system in 2017.  And coincidentally, with the introduction of their subscription plans, the service has continued to worsen each day.  They have supposedly rolled back sundowning their older cameras, yet all my cameras (pro/pro2) continue to be more problematic as each day goes by.  Hmm.  

What’s absurd is that while troubleshooting on the app why my cameras are not functioning, I constantly get pop-ups nudging me to subscribe to Arlo Secure.  Why deal with all these problems and issues for free when you can pay a monthly fee to deal with them instead?  And paying for a monthly fee suddenly solves all these problems?  That’s actually really concerning.  

This is the common tech playbook: offer a service for free (software) that pairs with paid hardware, build a loyal customer base, introduce a paid service, worsen stability and remove features from that free service to force their customers (who made Arlo such a success that it had to become a separate entity from Netgear) to pay for the subscription.  Here’s a tip: make customers run to a product/service instead of running from a product/service made worse by their own company.    

Some of the solutions on these forums say you need to subscribe to Arlo Secure to fix the issues.  Sure.  

A lot of solutions say to remove the base and just add all the cameras again.  As if doing that is like the easiest thing in the world.  If I do that to solve this problem, it would be the 3rd or 4th time that I’ve done it.  I have 5 cameras and a doorbell.  It’s a real pain.  It’s even worse when you have the system integrated with other services or hardware (Google Smart Display) because that all has to be reset again.     

I have no problem with digital subscriptions (that’s just how it is these days).  It’s how tech companies go about doing it (see above).  Even if Arlo is separate, I won’t even purchase anything branded Netgear (routers, etc) simply due to how Arlo has treated their legacy customers.  Companies like this won’t be here for the long term.   

I’m not even trying to fix this problem.  It’s time to move on.  Certainly, other similar companies do the same thing.  But it’s easier to deal with those problems when their cameras are a 3rd of the cost of Arlo.

Arlo, won’t miss my business, but they’re losing a longtime customer.  I imagine I’m not the only one.  

[ShayneS]

HI @NoArlo007 

Thanks for the feedback. I would be happy to try and help out. Can you please provide more detail regarding the exact symptom that you are experiencing.