Reviews: Nest Security Camera Matters Anywhere

A review TK say Buyer Beware - good product, lousy business strategy..
I purchased four of these cameras to be used at two separate locations - primarily because of the notification feature that will send you an email if a camera detects movement or a noise. What Nest fails to mention in their promotional material is that their software that minimizes false alerts is only active if you subscribe to their Nest Aware monthly subscription service. Without this software active, minute movements (a small bug, sunlight, shadows, etc) will trigger a false email activity alert. I literally get dozens of erroneous email alerts a day. I spoke with Joshua in Nest's product support group. He's confirmed the only fix to the problem is to subscribe to Nest's monthly service. Subscription to Nest Aware would cost more in one year than I paid for the cameras. What's worse is that they include one month of Nest Aware with your initial hardware purchase so the multitude of false email alerts doesn't begin until you've passed your 30 refund period. There are better options available.

My friend Dennis Mac say MAJOR DEAL BREAKER is the forced monthly subscription price. Bad talk back option..
Worked great except for its talk back option.
When you are talking on it, it mutes the sound you hear and you cannot carry a conversation on it like you can on a walkie talkie or phone.
Why it mutes the sound from you hearing what people are speaking back to you? I don't know, but this was a deal breaker for me because I have 2 3 and 5 year olds. When I'm in the garage working out, and I see them doing something and I need to say something to them, they can only hear me but I can't hear what my kids area saying back. Plus, the volume of my voice is very low. I should of bought the outdoor cam because it had bigger speakers, plus being made for outdoors makes it more durable.
THE MAJOR DEAL BREAKER is the forced monthly subscription price. If you opt out, you only get 3 hours of rollback time, and it continuously deletes everything every minute it passes 3 hours. I mean, who buys an expensive piece of equipment for 3hours of playback?
I would of kept it if it allowed 1 week of free cloud memory playback access, but combination of bad talk-back and subscription makes this a dud.
I was planning on buying 5 more Nest Cameras too total close to $1000.
I decided to steer away from NEST CAM.
I am looking into Wyze Cam. 14 days free cloud memory, no monthly subscriptions and it has all the features this has. Right now it is flying off the shelves for $25 bucks a cam. I bought 6 already on back order for the price of one Nest Cam. Ridiculous right????

While Digital Nomad said AVOID!!! The camera costs ~178 and the 3 year cost to run them is $360! They are three times the price you see here! Bad show!.
This is a return item for us. It's a fantastic product that works extremely well, but the subscription service behind these cameras is unscalable and expensive at $10/mo per device with no quantity discount. I bought two of them, and found myself facing the daunting prospect of paying $240/yr on subscription service alone just to use them. Without the subscription service, most of the useful features are *disabled*.

Until the service is brought in line with competitors pricing (like Ring, which is $99/yr for unlimited devices), Nest cameras should be avoided. Not sure what they're trying to pull here, but as a longtime Nest customer this is my first return and I am profoundly disappointed in the company for the awful and greedy contract. We bought them sight unseen just on the basis of the house full of Nest equipment we have had nothing bus positive experiences with, but the service makes these untenable. We will be seriously rethinking whether or not to continue buying Nest products after this.

Bad show Nest. Get it together. As a longtime customer, I am returning these, and will be seriously rethinking whether or not to continue to support you as a business after this poor performance. Assuming these last three years (which I would consider bare minimum), these will cost *twice as much to run as they do to purchase* even in that *short* timeframe. That's outrageous. Especially when you consider the total lack of quantity discount for multiple devices.

Honestly, I was outraged, and felt completely ripped off. I strong encourage others to avoid then.

In all other ways, these seem to be excellent product, so if Nest actually started selling these with a competitive contract and brought their pricing inline with any of the other top-end providers in the market, I would consider changing this review.

My friend Junkyard Brewing Co. say Subscription problems are a crippling defect in this product.
Everything else about Nest cameras is great; great picture, great application, great night vision, and all around nice features and quality. The part where it all comes crashing down is when you try to deal with subscriptions.

Problem number 1: You have to CANCEL your subscription and lose all your saved footage before you can upgrade to a new subscription with longer storage. This is a huge problem because it leaves you with gaps in your surveillance.

Problem number 2: It takes Nest systems a long time to synchronize subscription information with cameras. You cannot simply cancel and resubscribe. You will have to cancel and wait hours or days for the subscription information to be synchronized, and only then will Nest accept your payment for a new subscription. This is an incredibly bad way to run a business in today's marketplace where payments are, and should be, immediate.

Do a google search and you will find these problems with their subscription service are widespread and ongoing, also well known to their tech support people, whom I have spoken with.

Otherwise everything else about these cameras is great. It's really too bad that Nest shoots itself in the foot with the subscriptions. It seems that subscriptions would be a big source of income for them, but unfortunately it's a laughably terrible system.

As Raymond L. experience Buggy software and you must buy a subscription to make these cameras useful.
I did a lot of research before choosing the NEST cams. And I really wanted to like them… But after using them (one indoor, one outdoor) for two months I simply cannot recommend. It was a very frustrating experience and I wouldn’t buy if I had to do it all over again. I tried to be as specific as possible to clearly define my exact issues and complaints. Perhaps folks can suggest solutions/workarounds.

The NEST app is not intuitive, difficult to navigate, and buggy --- to the point of being maddening when you first start using it. My whole reason for going with NEST is that I thought the interface and features would be well-designed. I was wrong. I expected better from them. Here are my main issues:
1. After initial setup I had to delete & reinstall both my cameras because each was under a different ‘Home’. If you use the “+” button in upper right corner it will add a 2nd Home… you must go under 1st Home and choose “Add Product” under the tools pulldown in order to add additional cameras --- completely non-intuitive and not how most apps use the “+” button (eg. TP-Link KASA app uses the same “+” button to add devices). I would think that many users would fall into this same trap. The only way out is to delete everything and start over. Not a good way to start…
2. NEST has ensured that this camera is not useful unless you pay for a subscription. They do this by eliminating most of the features if you don’t have one (Zone motion triggers, person detection, see past video, etc). Without a subscription you get ZERO video archive (some reviewers were saying it was limited to 3hrs or 12hrs, but this is false). You only get a still picture of motion or generic sound alarm that occurred WITHIN THE LAST 3 HOURS, and the still may or may not actually have the image of what generated the alarm. So if something happens in the middle of the night you won’t have a record of it the next morning. They are trying very hard to make this camera equivalent to a live-only camera unless you buy their subscription!
3. This is a cloud-based system, meaning that you have NO WAY to view any video unless sending to the cloud. The bandwidth usage is completely outrageous! I got an email from my internet provider after two weeks stating that I exceeded my quota of 300GB/mo. I was uploading 5GB per day for ‘Medium’ quality! For two cameras on high quality it consumes 600GB per month! The app gives data/bandwidth requirements under “Quality and Bandwidth” pulldown, along with data hog warning – see screencap below. This is ridiculous and will exceed most internet provider data plans. So I can only turn on the cameras for a few hours each day and reduce the video quality --- so what’s the point of paying for “high def” cameras if I can’t use them? And why pay even more for a subscription if I can’t fully utilize it? And it isn’t possible to use cameras at all without sending to cloud, so now I am wishing I had bought something else…
4. The NEST app provides integration with the TP-Link ‘KASA’ app, specifically: When toggling between “Home/Away” mode you can trigger specific SCENES. I have my TP-Link color LED bulb in Foyer turn GREEN or RED (RED=Away, GREEN=Home) anytime the NEST app sees that I physically leave my house (linked to my phone location) or someone manually toggles “Home/Away” which also turns my cameras ON/OFF. This manual toggle can be done either within NEST app OR the KASA app (icon added under devices—see screencap below). In KASA, my wife can see the color of the bulb and shows what time I left (or arrived) at the house.
- Note: You can independently schedule cam ON/OFF times and this does not impact “Home/Away” status (ie. lights do not change status)
- Warning: Periodically my indoor cam does not shut off when status changes to “Home”. If I don’t notice right away, eats up a lot of my data quota!
- Warning: Every time you logout and log back in you will have to reconfigure the “Home/Away” settings – no way around this. Bad software!
- Warning: The linkage between the KASA and the NEST app keeps breaking… doesn’t work as advertised. I completely wasted my money…
5. Software issues on the NEST side --- all day 1/4/18 I was unable to view live video or turn the cameras ON or OFF. The cams were indeed working and could view past video from this timeframe. After more than 1hr of troubleshooting I gave up. Today everything is suddenly working properly again. I figure it must have been an issue on the NEST side… That is the problem with cloud-based systems, you are dependent on their systems to work as well as yours.
6. Not a big deal, but every time you install a new camera (or delete and reinstall existing camera) as I have had to do numerous times, it gives completion error msg: “Oh No! Something has gone wrong”, even though everything has installed correctly. I really hate this software.
In summary, the NEST cameras are not reliable and I will avoid NEST products in the future.

While dd71 said Bugs and lousy support - Not recommended.
I purchased the Nest Cam Security Camera 3-pack. It arrived on time and was beautifully packaged. Set-up took a little time, but was made easier thanks to smart use of bar codes on the back of each camera, in conjunction with the Nest App. So far so good. For most home users, the cameras are useless without a cloud storage subscription. With a subscription, video is stored in the cloud, and you can review historic activity at any point in your history (10 or 30 days) or upon events for example if motion or sound was detected. Without a subscription, you can only watch the video live. Not very useful for security purposes. Nest will not allow you to use third party cloud storage providers so you're locked into using their facility, which is priced much higher than regular cloud storage.

So I purchased a 3-pack of licenses to go with the three cameras. Unfortunately, Nest only associated two of the licenses with two of my cameras, leaving the third camera without a storage ability, despite paying for it. The third license, according to my account, will be applied to my next camera purchase, essentially rendering one of my three cameras useless. I have no plans to buy another camera. Clearly a bug in their system caused one of my cameras and licenses not to be matched. I contacted Nest support and they would not associate the unmatched license and camera. They told me they may re-review the case once the camera storage trial storage period expired. Despite buying three cameras and three licenses, I have one camera which i useless one license which Nest are trying to get me to buy a fourth camera to use it. Worse, for a business in the security business, they will only review this case once my home is unsecure.

Up to this point I've loved Nest's smoke alarm product. I have five of them and they have served me well. But I'd warn people away from the nest security cams until Nest have fixed the bugs and improved the level of their support, which is close to non-existant. I'm very disappointed with this product.

A review KathyP said Overpriced Webcam, but works great (until they try to get you to buy the subscription).
An expensive webcam with great quality video. Works pretty flawlessly. The WORST thing about it is the subscription they want you to buy to view your video after the 30 day free trial expires. I just use this thing to watch my dog during the day so now it's kind of pointless, but once the 30 day subscription expired, you can no longer view the video clips/recording. What you CAN see is a few random screen shots of activity, but you cannot actually play the video which is so weird. I thought I would at least be able to view 3 hours of video that was previously recorded, but this is not the case. It's really just the past 3 hours of screen shots. I refuse to pay any subscription fee for this thing.
Facial recognition is pretty good - it even recognizes faces on TV. My only issue is the cost of the subscription, which I refuse to pay for and hope others do too.

This a word from Striders Talk Location-based notification no longer work and the app is very buggy compared to the original Dropcam.
I have owned the Dropcam Pro (before Nest bought Dropcam) for a loooong time and it works very reliably:

1). Location-based notification:
The camera will ONLY send notification if I am not at home. This is done through the iPhone app that check my phone location.

2). Customized zones:
I want to receive notification only for certain "zone" of the camera view. I.e. area near my front door and balcony only and ignore the rest of the house. It never failed to do so.

The Nest Cam went on sale during the 2016 Holiday Season, so I picked one up. Bad move! The camera has a lot of issue that NONE of the above works properly:

1). I received notification even at home.
2). When I received notification and open it through the iPhone app, the video hang. Just a circle going around and around.
3). I now receive notification for ANYTHING in the camera view. The camera just ignored my "zone" setting above.

No changes to the iPhone app setting nor my network, so it is definitely the camera. Nest support is also stumped and couldn't help.

Review JodiC experience Nest Cam is a MUST HAVE for those living far away from elderly parents.
I cannot say enough good things about the Nest Cam. I purchased a 3 pack and a single camera (total 4 cameras) for my mother's apartment.
My Mom is 86 years old and is in stage 3 of Alzheimer's disease. She forgets everything all of the time. We live 1200 miles apart. The Nest Cam has helped me help her with her daily routines. We do not use the Nest Cam with a video tape. We just use it as a live camera so I can check in with her & help her follow through on her chores. The picture quality is excellent. There is even sound so you can have a full conversation over the Nest Cam. You can talk and be heard and listen to what the person at the other end of the camera is saying. Cameras were very fast and easy to set up and move around. Setting up your on line account was simple. Anyone can do it. You need "0" experience to set up & use. When using the camera this way, there is no monthly charge of any kind. If you want to move the camera around frequently, just purchase an extension cord. I frequently help my mother while she is on the computer. My mother moves the camera directly in front of her computer screen so I can see what she is doing, read her computer screen & assist her with tasks she finds difficult. I can make sure she turns off the oven after she cooks.
The customer service at Nest is among the best I have ever come across. They are friendly, professional, knowledgeable, and available 24/7. I called them a few time before purchasing the Nest Cam and 2X afterwards.I was speaking to someone at Nest within 1-2 minutes each time I called which was very impressive. I am used to being put on hold listening to bad music for 10-15 minutes when calling customer service at other companies. Another good feature is that Nest e-mails you every time there is a break in Wi-Fi service. The Nest camera system would be a great security camera system but it is also ideal to help and keep track of elderly parents. I highly recommend the Nest Cam system.

My friend capnkirk Talk Banner Ad? Are you kidding me?.
I already owned 2 Nest thermostats and 4 Nest protects when I purchased this Nest cam. The camera itself seems to be very good quality. The set up was a breeze and camera was operational in just a couple of minutes. The reason for the 1 star review is that if you don't subscribe to their Nest aware that starts at $10 a month you will have to stare at a banner ad on all of your devices that you have the Nest app installed on nagging you to subscribe to it. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Nest support this morning and was even transferred to a senior level tech who told me the only way to get rid of the banner ad was to subscribe to Nest aware. Guess what? I figured out another way to get rid of the banner ad. I am boxing it up and returning it! Nest should be ashamed to subject customers who have spent good money on their products to this. I am still within my 30 days on my other items I may just box it all up and go with a different brand.