I originally bought this for my garage/backyard gate. This part of my house has no access to it unless you literally open up the garage, so having a camera allowed me to see what was there prior to having to actually open up the garage. Initially it was kind of a chore to setup. Their app and account is incredibly frustrating to use, with little recourse to troubleshoot. If your camera does not want to boot into "discovery" mode, too bad. If your camera is not found on your WiFi network, too bad. The actual camera part of it is really good actually. After finally getting it setup, the picture was great, night vision was not perfect, but good enough to see use, my garage bumps up against a minor street so the street lamps lighted up the street well enough, but I had another in my courtyard, and the night vision allowed me to see movement and tell whether something was human or not, but not quite enough to identify features. When I purchased this, it was stated that online and cloud recording was not included, but they did not say that that was the only recordings that were offered, as there is NO ability to do local recording AT ALL. Initially, it stated that both the special motion ability, (the camera ability to recognize people vs cars vs animal etc.), and cloud recording would not be available after their free trial, which I was fine with, as the aforementioned reasoning behind buying this was mainly to see who or what was at my garage before having to open it, but it was quite frankly felt like the rug was pulled out from under me. To add more annoyances to it, I tried to add my parents to the account as they have a small "guest house/room" and stay over quite often, however once I added them to the account arlo would continuously have them do the same thing over again. They would receive an email inviting them to be added, they would fill in information to be added, asked to create an account, and then be told they cannot add this account to another account, and rinse and repeat. Again just frustrating. Finally the straw that broke the camels back: I upgraded my internet, and received a new router, which meant I had to update and reset up all my internet devices, including the cameras. This turned into a several hour debacle. I followed their instructions, it said it connected but even after waiting 15 plus minutes I cannot "connect" to my devices. I even reset both cameras and tried to add them back in. I changed my WiFi information to give it fresh, new information just in case using the same information was causing a problem. At no point in time could I get it working properly. The cherry on top is that when I went to their website and tried to sign in, I used the same password I use on the app, but it would not let me in. I had to get in via a secondary method, which worked, but I could not find a way to reset my password, they only offered a change of password which required me to know my current one, which was not working! I had to log out, to reset my password!!! I have never seen that before, but the best part is that when I received the change password link, and I filled it out, I used the same password I had been using and it said "Cannot use the password you have used previously", I have never changed my password for Arlo, so for some reason I was using the right password but Arlo account would not let me in. TLDR: Camera is awesome, a little tedious to setup, but their app is awful, their account management is horrendous, and essentially without any of their subscriptions, you will not have any features. Also cannot use the cameras without their App.
