The Subscription Creep Index: Security Plan Prices 2020-2026

The index: every documented increase

This table only includes price changes we could verify against a dated source: the company's own announcement or support page where one exists, and contemporaneous reporting from established tech press otherwise. Increases we could not document that way are listed in the exclusions section, not the table. US pricing throughout. Percentages are our arithmetic on the documented figures.

All prices exclude tax. Ring, Blink, and Wyze changes apply at renewal rather than on a single calendar date, so individual subscribers saw the new price at different times.

The compounding effect: same camera, same features, higher bill

Single increases look small. The pattern is what matters.

Ring Protect Basic is the cleanest example because it was hiked twice in 22 months. A subscriber paying $30/yr in early 2022 paid $39.99/yr from July 2022 and $49.99/yr from their first renewal after March 11, 2024. That is a 67% cumulative increase, on a plan whose core function (cloud storage of motion clips for one camera) did not change. TechCrunch noted at the time that the 2022 hike was the plan's first price increase since its 2015 introduction; the second one followed within two years.

Ring's legacy alarm subscribers took the single largest documented jump in this index. Ring Protect Plus (1st Gen) holders with a Ring Alarm, many of whom had held the $10/mo grandfathered rate for years, were migrated to a Premium Legacy plan at $19.99/mo or $199.99/yr on their first renewal after April 8, 2025. Ring's own support article states the increase plainly: price up by $10 a month or $100 a year. Subscribers could avoid it only by dropping 24/7 professional monitoring, the feature most of them bought the plan for.

Wyze's March 2026 change is the steepest single percentage in the table: Cam Plus Annual goes from $19.99 to $29.99 per year, a 50% increase, while the monthly price stays at $2.99. The effect is to shrink the annual-billing discount rather than raise the headline monthly price, which is a quieter way to take the same revenue.

How the increases are packaged

Across the ten documented rows, three packaging patterns repeat.

Pair the hike with features. Ring's 2022 increase arrived alongside new app features; Arlo's January 2025 increase was framed as funding AI features; Blink's 2025 increase coincided with the launch of AI-branded plan tiers; Wyze's FAQ justifies its 2026 increase with a list of added features. Whether the features are worth the delta is a judgment call, but the pattern means the price of standing still (keeping the plan you already had) rises regardless.

Raise at renewal, not on a date. Ring (2025), Blink (2025), and Wyze (2026) all applied increases at each subscriber's next renewal. This spreads the change over a year and avoids a single day of cancellations.

Offer a lock-in window. Blink told US customers on September 8, 2025 that they could lock in old pricing by buying a 1-, 2-, or 3-year Plus subscription before October 8, 2025. This converts a price hike into a prepayment drive.

None of this is unique to security; it is standard subscription economics. But security subscriptions are stickier than most, because canceling can mean losing alarm response or video history for a system you have already mounted on your walls. That stickiness is worth pricing into the purchase decision: the subscription you sign up for is the cheapest that subscription will ever be. Current prices for every major plan are in our monthly cost table, and the no-subscription escape hatch is covered in best self-monitored systems with no monthly fee.

What we excluded and why

Rows were excluded when we could not trace both the old and new price to a dated announcement or reputable contemporaneous coverage. Excluded, for transparency:

• SimpliSafe. Subscribers report an Interactive plan increase from $24.99 to $27.99/mo in March 2022 and a further $2 increase in August 2023, but we found these only in user forum posts, not in a SimpliSafe announcement or established press coverage, so they do not appear in the table. SimpliSafe today publishes per-day pricing (Core at $1.10/day, roughly $33/mo).
• ADT. ADT adjusts monitoring rates on individual accounts rather than publishing list-price changes, so there is no documentable old-price/new-price pair.
• Earlier Nest Aware steps. Users describe Nest Aware Plus moving through $12 and $15 price points before 2025; we did not verify dated sources for those steps and excluded them.
• Arlo increases before 2025. The Verge's January 2025 piece describes Arlo's subscriptions as going up "again," indicating at least one earlier increase, but we did not verify the specific old/new figures and dates, so only the January 2025 change is tabled.
• Wyze Cam Plus monthly history. Community posts reference earlier Cam Plus annual pricing around $14.99; unverified, excluded.

If a reader can supply a dated primary source for any excluded row, we will add it.