*Update added* So far, I'm not very impressed. I installed this, after charging the battery. I went outside, it seemed to work and notified me I was there. Cool. Then, I had some other packages delivered from other websites besides Amazon, and it did not notify me. They delivered the package not even 4 feet to the right of the ring. Going to my "premium trial recorded video" on the app, it just randomly appears, after it skips 15 seconds. No parked vehicles shown, no one walking, etc. Okay... We all have small issues. Last night, when it went from daylight, to night, it literally goes from bright outside, skips 15 or so seconds, and then it's somehow dark dark night. It doesn't show transition, it just goes from 5:40pm bright, to 5:41pm or something, dark black night. I get home today, and same thing, it doesn't register that I'm there, it doesn't register my truck pulling in, or me walking up to the front door. It doesn't work, and if it continues this, I'll have to return it within the time frame allotted from amazon. I'm kind of annoyed that this thing was nearly $200, and has so many issues within the first day or two. *Update 9/8/20* Following my previous posting of this review, I received an e-mail from a representative from Ring at 12:32pm, apparently I did not answer fast enough, and she messaged again 1:39pm, with a quote of the previous message in it the new e-mail. I responded and told her I would get back to her when I had free time due to running my company. The response was that she did not mean to send another e-mail, (remember, she had quoted the previous message, so this seemed odd.) After 3 days of me not messaging to have her tell me what I had already figured out from the instructions when I first installed it to begin with, she messaged again to get in contact, and eventually closed the report 2 days after that. I did not contact them during this period, in full disclosure. Today is the first day my 'trial' period is over, and I cannot access my ring. I cannot use it for live video, and literally everything is setting it off. It seems like as soon as your trial period is over, they reset all of the previous settings and do not allow for any usage of a nearly $200 piece of equipment. This is absolutely ridiculous, and I HIGHLY suggest everyone stay away from it unless you are willing to constantly pay a monthly fee just to use it, even at the most basic of functions advertised. This hunk of excrement would have been returned if I had not had the high hopes, and already thrown away the box it came in. Waste of money.

I rarely write reviews but I've had it with Ring products. I've have 3 different Ring doorbells (2 Ring 1 and 1 Ring 3) at 2 different houses and all three will regularly lose the wi-fi connection. Rings feeble (at best) tech support, which is primarily automated, is absolutely useless and will only tell you that you have a wi-fi issue in your house. There is absolutely no wi-fi signal strength issue in either house I have these doorbells on. Never have an issue with any other wi-fi device losing it's connection on a regular basis like these crap doorbells do and other wi-fi devices will work even outside at the farthest reaches of my property. I've tried their wi-fi extender/ringer but still loses connection. Money wasted. I even had a friend in the IT field come over and test the signal strength literally right next to the doorbell and his meter always had 4-5 bars showing. The final straw for me was, upon discovering the doorbell lost connection again, finding the battery dead even though I'm hard wired to a 24v source. NO WHERE in any of their listings on Amazon or in the installation instructions does it state that this doorbell is still reliant on the battery and will require charging on a regular basis. I had to discover this the hard way after filtering though page after page of useless automated "tech help". You can dumb down all the features, the detection range, etc but even dumbed down, the battery will eventually drain, the doorbell will stop working and it will take 10 hours for the battery to recharge. And while the battery is charging for 10 hours, the doorbell is non functional. Oh and I got no message or warning from the app to tell me the battery needs charging. (yes, notifications are enabled on my phone) So, more money, time and effort by me wasted on purchasing/installing a 24v transformer, running the doorbell wire and installing Ring resistor to protect the doorbell. The whole reason for me doing this is so I WOULD NOT HAVE TO CHARGE THE BATTERY ANYMORE. If Amazon stated this in the listing or if Ring stated this in the installation instruction, I at least would have known this and not be so pissed off about it. I've spent 100's of dollar on their products and they will never get another penny from me.

Glorified doorbell camera without the subscription. And the problem is this company bullies and taunts you into the subscription. We had this doorbell for a couple weeks before installing. When we finally did get around to it the free trial had kicked in already and we adjusted the alert zones so that our neighbor’s car and the busy street wouldn’t detect motion constantly. Zones adjusted, we had a couple alerts of delivered packages. Less than three total that entire week. The same day the free trial ended we received over 45 alerts in the span of two hours. Keep in mind that I had adjusted the zones prior and did not set them to default once the trial ended. There was literally NO reason we should have received that many alerts literal hours after the free trial ended. The next day was much the same. Of course the real problem was that even without the subscription you should be able to access your camera and live feed at any time connected to wifi or data. We tried both and the live feed would buffer and load on loop for minutes well after any perceived motion had left. This of course prevented us from viewing our property which is the BARE MINIMUM this stupid device is supposed to allow. I don’t care about recording a few seconds before the motion occurred if I have access to live footage. In my opinion this scumbag company likes to bully and coerce their customers into using the subscription service by giving false notifications. Multiple times while I was home and had a view of the street, I would receive a couple alerts and there would be nothing within my view—the same view this doorbell had. Even after adjusting the motion sensitivity and other settings we revived bogus alerts just to scare us into buying the subscription service. And that, along with actively preventing us from even using the camera functionality, gives me a pretty clear picture of how truly greedy and abhorrent this company behaves. I had no knowledge of needing the subscription service prior to purchasing this product and I will admit to my lack of research. However, there is NO excuse for a company to behave this way and prevent me from viewing my own property with their product. The funny part is that the subscription is inexpensive and if I had not had this experience I would have paid it without thought. But the moment the product bombarded me with pointless motion alerts and prevented my access to the camera (with both wifi and data options) was the moment it became irrelevant and a glorified camera service. Not even the camera functions all the time. It is a shame we bought this one when there are plenty of other options out there that offer the prior-to-alert feedback without the extra fee and don’t bully their customers. Would absolutely not recommend this to anyone. Save your money for another product and don’t waste your time on this piece of garbage.

So the product works ok. It does give too many updates to my cell phone, which is annoying, but otherwise does produce good quality video and audio of what is going on at my front door. No issues there. The issue is that Amazon has a totally screwy policy of what they are doing with the video that is collected by MY doorbell. Because they do a lot of business with the government (sketchy to begin with), including federal, state and local governments, they have decided to share video with entities like the local police WITHOUT LETTING THE USER KNOW THEY ARE DOING SO AND WITHOUT GETTING A WARRANT. They claim they are doing so only in imminent danger situations, but there are already multiple instances where they are sharing info that has nothing to do with imminent danger. This is a crazy policy. We already have a system for turning over information needed by authorities. It is the warrant process, and it already couldn't be easier. Most warrants can be requested remotely and are almost immediately granted, so there is not some bureaucracy that authorities have to worry about when seeking a warrant. And I personally like having the safeguard of warrants being needed for sharing of my information. I do not trust some Ring employee to do this on my behalf without even notifying me that they have done so. Amazon is only doing this because they want to stay on the good side of government, particularly local governments, because it is in their corporate interests to do so. This is not about protecting you and me, but rather themselves. They are abusing the power this product provides them, and I'm not going to play ball with that. So I'm moving to the Microsoft Home product, as they have a more defensible data sharing policy.

Update 2022-07-18: DO NOT BUY! Now Ring has admitted that they have been giving away people's video footage to police without a warrant and without the customers' approval or even their knowledge. As long as you don't need any technical support, you might be fine. Their back end team don't know what they're doing and then have the nerve to be rude about it. As of right now, I have been on hold for half hour. I have had to verify my identity 4 times. One of the times they emailed me asking to reply with a screenshot of a utility bill. But they emailed me form an address that CANNOT receive emails, thus wasting more of my time. I set up 2-factor authentication, but my phone had to be wiped and repaired. with the erasure, i also lose all accounts logged into the authentication app. Unlike Office 365, ring does not have a backup method for getting into your account if you don't have the primary authenticator. So you need to login to the website to set up your authenticator, but oh no you can't login to the website without having authenticator setup. it's a stupid chicken and the egg kind of situation. Explaining this to the Technical support person, she was still dead set on telling me that I could get a QR code from logging into the authenticator app. Newsflash I can't login to my account ANYWHERE. Secondly, you don't get a QR code from the APP. the QR code is what you get from the website so that you can add your Ring account to your authenticator app. After going in circles with her for 17 minutes, I demanded a supervisor because she was insistent that I get a QR code from the authenticator app. While I'm on hold, Supervisor Jason calls me on my other line. Apparently the technician was so incompetent, she couldn't simply transfer the call. The supervisor was the idiot asking me to verify who i was again with a screenshot of our utility bill, but then emailed me from an email address that cannot receive emails. Then he had the nerve to ask me to drive to the office to ring the doorbell to prove identity. I told guy "I don't know where you've been for the last 2 years, but there's been a pandemic and people don't go into the office anymore." This fool held med hostage on the phone for 36 minutes. I am deeply offended these people have the nerve to call themselves technical support. I have been an IT professional for 2 decades I have never encountered such incompetence from people claiming to be IT support, EVER. Lesson learned, when these doorbells are up for renewal, I will buy ANYTHING else.

Prior to purchase I confirmed the ability to use the Ring device without having to subscribe to the monthly service. Purchased in November 2020, installed in December 2020. My intention was to in another couple of months subscribe to the annual plan and do so then to move the annual fee to a month where more funds are available following the holiday season purchasing blitz and then to renew year to year. Now that I have had it more than 30 days and the free 30 day subscription is expired to my surprise the device has changed to some hidden settings or programming scheme that make it very cumbersome to use and penalize you for not subscribing and make life difficult. Immediately upon expiration I began receiving false notification of activity at front door, when activity is detected and you want it the front door view to show on a Alexa device you receive a notice from Alexa that it cannot connect. Some settings or abilities have diminished it effectiveness. It will not connect until many minutes or so afterwards just to make you have to go check the door yourself. What good is it now! You could suspect it's internet...I have a very adequate internet and booster and checked the internet for presence and speed at each glitch, yup, that work's great 200+ to 400+ Mbps Download and always 17+ Mbps upload so that's not the problem nor is the placement or distance a problem as it's in the Livingroom close to the front door! Again, it all worked fabulously during the 30 day trial period and instantly upon the expiration it's function is significantly different! You would think the only thing different without the plan would be the loss of the videos only? The notifications are also different, there now are audible "motion detected at the front door" repeated twice at all Alexa devices so is more in your face that you did not subscribe and you are being punished for not doing so! Waking up everyone in the house where ever Alexa devices have been placed. I also tried to use the snooze setting to go out and check the mail box as I have in the past, which when you snooze the device it worked very well, now, it only snoozes one setting of three and you still get notifications unless that you now have to take two or four more steps to deselect an additional setting(s) or two to snooze the motion setting. There are automatic settings not no longer apply and their lack of application influences the functionality which you now have to do manually. I feel certain as time goes by I am going to find other frustrating engineered scheme differences now the subscription is expired. Without subscription it appears to be designed to function archaically so you are being punished for not subscribing or rather influenced greatly to subscribe by engineered design. Sounds like a class action lawsuit potential due such a drastic difference in how it functions without the plan and not specifically detailing what it lost by not subscribing! Maybe Google's Nest would be worth trying instead. I am considering whether or not to return the whole system (front and back door) and moving on to a different system, this is by design is a real got ya! BUYER BEWARE! You are forced to pay the piper so to speak!

The Product: The ring doorbell often missed people in front of it, to the point where our pet sitter showed up 6 times and was captured only once over the course of 3 days. We decided to return the doorbell. The service: I first tried to contact Ring, since I had the Protect Plus plan, to conduct an exchange. I said I was considering a return on all my equipment and the service person without hesitation created a shipping label and cancelled my protect plus plan. I was suspicious and called back, and found out if I'd shipped back my products I wouldn't have gotten a refund because I'd bought through amazon. The warranty: Ring supposedly offers a 1 year warranty on these devices, but I was told both times I called that since I bought through amazon only the amazon 30 day warranty applied. I explained both times I had purchased the extended warranty through Ring and was told that didn't matter, so I chose to go to Amazon and ask for a partial refund with a 20% restocking fee which they happily provided with fewer questions and less hold time. The follow up: Ring called me after I submitted my review saying I was dissatisfied. They tried to explain their one year warranty to me and I reexplained what was printed on their site. They conceded that they could in fact have given me at least an exchange if not a refund. I thanked them for their time and told them I'd already arranged a return through amazon and no longer wanted anything to do with their business. Summary: It is my opinion that Ring tried to scam me out of my money at least twice and lied to me in an attempt to make me keep their product and service. I would not recommend Ring to anyone.