Ring Doorbell Review

Ring shipped its first video doorbell in 2014, built a massive consumer-tech category around it over four years, and was acquired by Amazon in February 2018 for somewhere around $1 billion. As of mid-2018 the original Ring at $99 and the Ring Pro at $249 are the two main models, with the Ring Doorbell 2 at $199 splitting the difference. The product as a category-defining piece of hardware is real. The product as part of Amazon's surveillance footprint is the more interesting conversation.

The Hardware

Ring's standard model is a battery-powered doorbell that mounts where your existing doorbell button used to be. It captures 1080p video on motion or button press, has two-way audio, and includes IR for night vision. The battery lasts six to twelve months between charges, depending on how active your front door is, and recharging means popping the unit off the mount and plugging in a USB cable for a few hours.

The Pro version is hardwired (it taps the existing low-voltage doorbell wiring for power), supports 1080p HDR, has better motion zones, and is meaningfully smaller. For a house with existing doorbell wiring, the Pro is the right buy because you never have to charge it. For a house without (which describes most apartments and a chunk of newer builds), the battery-powered standard model is the only option.

The App and the Subscription

Without a subscription, Ring sends you a real-time alert when motion is detected or someone presses the doorbell, and you can answer the door from anywhere with two-way audio through the app. There's no recording. If you want to review what happened thirty minutes ago, that's gone.

Ring Protect is the subscription tier. At $3 a month per device or $10 a month for unlimited devices, you get 60 days of cloud video history, the ability to share clips, and Rich Notifications (a thumbnail in the alert). The subscription is the actual product. Without it, the doorbell is mostly a fancy intercom. With it, the doorbell becomes a security camera with continuous historical record.

What It Does Well

Setup is straightforward. The app guides you through Wi-Fi pairing, mounting, and angle configuration in about 15 minutes. The included drill bit for a brick wall is a small touch that covers the most common installation case.

The motion detection is good and the Pro's motion zones are excellent. You can draw shapes on the camera frame to ignore the street while still triggering on the path to your door. That's the difference between getting alerted to every car driving by and only getting alerted when someone is actually approaching your house.

The Alexa integration is, predictably, the best in the category. Echo Show devices can pop up the Ring feed automatically when someone presses the doorbell. Echo speakers can announce the doorbell ring. The integration is tight enough that for an Amazon household, Ring is the obvious choice.

The Privacy Conversation

Amazon now owns a doorbell camera in millions of American homes. Ring also runs a feature called Neighbors, which is a hyperlocal app that shares clips between neighbors and (controversially) with local police departments under formal partnerships. Ring has voluntarily turned over thousands of clips to law enforcement since the program started, often without a warrant.

The privacy policy is the standard one: clips are encrypted in transit and at rest, only used for the service, etc. The harder question is what kind of de facto surveillance infrastructure gets built when Amazon owns a continuous video feed of every front door in a neighborhood. Some buyers find this trade reasonable for the security upgrade. Others find it disqualifying. The trade is worth thinking about explicitly.

Should You Buy One?

For practical purposes, Ring is the best video doorbell on the market in 2018. The hardware is competent, the app is well-designed, the subscription is cheap, and the Alexa integration is unmatched. If a video doorbell is the right product for your house, Ring is the obvious pick.

The harder question is whether a video doorbell is the right product at all, given what Amazon's footprint looks like and how easily clips end up shared with law enforcement. There's no objectively correct answer to that. Buy intentionally if you buy.