Wyze has come a long way from making "too-good-to-be-true" home security solutions — some moments more unfortunate than others — but the forward path to sustainability means making great subscription services at affordable prices. With that said, the company is now offering a new name-your-own-price subscription tier for Wyze Cam Plus.

Cam Plus Lite will bring 12-second video recordings as often as every 5 minutes with cloud storage for up to 14 days and bring person detection into the fold as well. As mentioned above, users decide how much they'll pay. That can mean nothing, if they really wanted, but Wyze will suggest certain donation levels to users.

The plan would apply to an entire household of supported products which include the Wyze Cam v2 and v3, Pan v1 and v2, and Cam Outdoor — Video Doorbell owners will be able to use Cam Plus Lite at a later date.

The new tier will not replace the free Basic Plan, which includes snapshots up to every five minutes with alerts for motion, sound, smoke, and carbon monoxide. Wyze Cam Plus, which features a variety of other detection triggers, Wyze Web View, and product discounts, still costs $2 per month or $15 per year, per device.

What will be changing for Basic Plan users, though, is the ability to save event recordings to the cloud. In an attempt to cut down on unnecessary notifications, Wyze will limit that ability to Cam Plus and Cam Plus Lite users only. There is, however, no enrollment deadline for free users to hop on to Cam Plus Lite nor are they obligated to sign up.

On the flip side, those who prefer local storage will be pleased to learn that Wyze has acquired an exFAT license that will allow users to install microSD cards larger than 32GB. Cam v3 owners already have this ability with the latest firmware update; other cameras will need to wait on the next one. Plus, event playback is being made much easier with one-tap access to timestamps and buttons for 30-second skip and rewind — expect the latter in mid-February.

This isn't the first time the company has gone with a name-your-price model. In 2020, it asked owners for contributions to use its nascent person detection feature as it struggled to stay afloat during the pandemic.

Wyze says it will evaluate the cash flow Cam Plus Lite generates before officially determining whether to offer the plan on future products. Of course, with the way things are going, we may also have to be prepared for the possibility of non-zero prices for all users someday.

You can sign up for Cam Plus Lite here.

UPDATE: 2022/01/14 10:20 EST BY JULES WANG

Clarification

A previous version of this article implied that Wyze would require the person detection feature available only to Cam Plus and Cam Plus Lite subscribers to trigger event recordings starting February 15. We've been notified that is not the case and regret the error.