Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This was a no brainer purchase for me when changed homes. If you have an alarm already or not, I hope this review will be helpful to you. Before purchasing an alarm system, you need to set expectations for yourself. What is it going to do for you? Deter burglers? Prevent your kid from running out at night? Know when your toddler runs out the garage door? Lower your home owners insurance premium? There could be many cases. Well with this system, You get far more than what the ADT, Bay alarm or whomever else knocks at your door to sell you a monthly fee and a contract. I'll tell you about why I have an alarm and why this one works for me. 1 - Price. I hate contracts, many of them auto-renew, and unless you read the small print on page 23 section A-4, you wont know that because they wont tell you out loud :). So for me paying for the hardware without a contract was key. CHECK! The price of the Ring.com hardware is fair and the price of professional monitoring WITH CELLULAR BACKUP THAT ACTUALLY WORKS is $10 a month, but wait - did you know it's included if you have the Protect Plus service with Ring.com? Yep! that means that $100 a year you pay for unlimited cameras and cloud recording becomes basically FREE and then some. I cant find any other carrier that will give professional monitoring for $8.30 a month. Superb value here! 2 - Access. I don't want to rely solely on the carrier to respond to an alarm when I'm away, I want to know immediately, not 90 seconds later after my dog is drugged and my TV is halfway out the door. With fluid access via the Ring.com app, I can monitor all kinds of things remotely, and the best part... 3 - Integration. If you dont have a ring doorbell, floodlight cam, stick up cam, etc - you're missing out. and with this sytem, it's fully integrated with the Ring cameras to work right along side the alarm for additional security and recording. Do you have an Amazon Echo? Even better! I have an Amazon Echo and 4 Amazon Echo Flex speakers throughout my home. Using Amazon Alexa routines, I can configure announcements for the different door/window sensors in my home. It really becomes an Alexa Security System for me. Example - an amazon alexa routine can be configured to send an announcement of "Inside Garage Door" through ALL of your amazon echo devices in the even the door sensor on the garage door changes its state to 'open'. These are key for me as I'm the one that needs to know when my toddler decides to run outside and not spend a lot of time trying to figure out WHAT door she went out of. +1 to safety there. This is only scratching the surface. You can do all sorts of things following a door trigger or motion. 4 - Notification: Push notifications let me know immediately when something is wrong such as a door sensor being tampered with, the system going on cellular backup, arming or disarming, or if a sensor is not working correctly. 5 - Battery life of keypads: I really didn't want to run wire to the keypads, so this was really important. Luckily Ring has some great power savings settings that have proven to work. The pads (if i remember) were said to last up to 6 months before charging. It's 6 months and neither of my keypads needs a charge yet, in fact the app shows them at full battery! I dont have the keypads play chirps (since my echos are doing that) and I dont have them light up from motion. They simply are there to arm/disarm or request emergency response. 6 - Customer service: It's important to mention the best customer service comes from a service meeting expectations that doesn't require a call to a human being. My only interaction I've had with customer service as it relates to Ring.com is the phone call to me when my alarm went off. They were very kind and helpful.