Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Not production ready... this thing has issues and is not for an amateur to set up. I've been using it for about 4 months and it's been aggravation from day one. First issue it didn't recognize the unlimited subscription and required me to contact their customer support to get it activated correctly. Second I've run into many instances where it has blocked traffic without ever issuing a warning in the app as it is advertised to do. I have reported these to their support, while they fixed one, other flaws exist. Their app frequently logs me out and gives you a 1-3 tries to login! Then locks itself out requiring me to contact their 800 number. There is no automated way to unlock!!!! Fourth when It does notify you of suspicious traffic its messages don't really help you to decide if this is actually malicious or give you any choice to unblock. Many times I have googled the IP to determine if it is actually black listed elsewhere. 75% of the time they are blocking an IP for Apple.com required by IOS or a domain for my SmartThings hub. This product is sold as a simple end to end solution, it's not ready, has too many flaws, and doesn't deliver. UPDATE 7/21/2017: On 7/18 Artie from CUJO support reached out to me directly about my poor review. While he was very polite and apologized for my "hassle", he didn't get to the bottom of any of my complaints with CUJO. In his first message he went as far offered me an Amazon dot as "a small token", which I feel like an attempt to BUY a couple more stars from me. From the email dated 7/18: "My name is Artie and I am a senior technician at CUJO. I have read your Amazon review and I am very concerned that this might have caused a rift between you and CUJO. I apologize for all the hassle you had to go through. Our support experience is as important as the state of the CUJO unit itself. I want to make things right between us. What I propose is a two part plan. First off, I wanted to ask you if you are still having any issues with the CUJO itself or the CUJO app? If you are, I would be able to schedule a call with our most senior 2nd level technician to solve any issues you are having, if these issues would somehow not get resolved, I would be able to transfer your issues directly to our dev team so they could work on it. Now, for the second part. Since a simple apology only takes us so far, I would like to offer you a gift as a small token. I can offer you an Echo Dot (see link below). [SNIP - Removed link] Tell me what you think and if I would be able to make this right for you. I will be waiting for a reply and hope to hear from you soon. Sincerely, Artie Senior technician | CUJO" After a few polite conversations, a simple technical support call became obvious would not address what I feel are real design problems with this product... an echo dot won't fix any listed below. My open list is as follows: - Artie confirms you have 3 attempts to login or your locked out by CUJO until a call to their 800 #. I feel this is harsh and their security model is very 1990's. - Lack of ability to perform a self-service lock out of my account. - Lack of 2-part authentication on my account. - Lack of any desktop application or web portal. If you don't have a working compatible iOS or Android device, this product is useless to you. - iOS app automatic log outs in the background randomly, preventing notifications from being raised on my phone unless I open the app and re-logon. - Lack of the ability to 'UNBLOCK' something CUJO is blocking. - Lack of any Logs and/or transparency in how CUJO is effecting MY network, logs and privacy. - Lack of any white listing. - Private VPNs blocked by CUJO - Perceived slowness of CUJO's cloud. - Flaws with missing messages reporting many blocked activites - Flaws and confusion in how messages are displayed. (i.e. blocked messages are shown as unblocked and sometimes vic-a-versa). Artie reports a bug fix some of this bullet. - "CUJO philosophically is plug and forget", well too many issues for this device for me to just "forget" about it. By their own admission at CUJO, with security it is difficult to prevent false positives and please everyone. But I feel you will encounter times when CUJO will stop you from getting work done and you have little choice but to remove all protection to get around it because of this philosophy. - Issue with devices not reconnecting to the network after having their internet connection turned off in the app. I have blocked devices from talking to the internet using the app. After turning internet back on for the device, the device could not reconnect after several attempts even after power cycling the devices, routers including CUJO. Eventually it reconnected on its own after about an hour of attempts. *** Update 8/28/2017 - Who says you can teach a bad dog new tricks? This weekend CUJO developed a new irritating flaw... It stopped allowing internet access to almost everything on my network (including the poor excuse for an iOS APP). For some strange reason it chose to allow one old computer on my network to work, while blocking everything else. Because CUJO sits between my DHCP server and MY WIFI access point, it was able to start blocking DHCP traffic also making the problem even worse! So when techinical support would have me do a hard reset, I couldn't attach my iphone to the network to get an IP so I could pair with it! Internet traffic worked normally if I plugged a laptop in front of CUJO confirming CUJO as the point of failure. Also removing CUJO allowed DHCP to flow normally and internet traffic to work. Also again, not having any logs makes networking problem almost IMPOSSIBLE to diagnose unless a CUJO tech is on the phone with you. They can see all your devices, mac address, IPS and traffic, BUT YOU CANNOT SEE THEIR LOGS. Something really wrong with this 'big brother' mentality they won't let go of. Frankly the privacy and transparency concerns of this thing will turn many off as they are in your network and you don't know what they are doing. After spending almost 4.5 hours with CUJO technical support, it was theorized by CUJO that a 'bad firmware upgrade' caused the issue. We did eventually get traffic to flow for about 7 hours, but don't really understand the cause for the failure. I was also able to reproduce flaws in their error reporting with one of their techs after it started working which he said he needs to investigate. At about 11:00pm it then chose to start blocking my HUE lighting system. So I am taking this dog to the pound and giving up on it. I've wasted too much time 'testing' their system which is just not ready for consumers. While their technical support is polite, I truly feel sorry for what they must go through day to day fending off angry customers because their developers and management are out to lunch. Marketing seems to be running the chicken coop and this product frustrates more than protects. I would advise an additional solution if you can find one, but there just isn't a good device for consumers yet from what I have seen. So essentially this thing is now a $200.00 paper weight heading for a landfill. My network runs faster (especially DNS lookups) and all connection problems have be eliminated once CUJO was completely removed. I spent almost 6 months trying to like this dog, but it bit me one too many times and I'm putting it down. *** UPDATE 8/29/2017 This is most puzzling... Ok one final update, but I need to report this... Something is very wrong with the CUJO app. Sunday, as I reported in my last update, I removed CUJO from my network totally, unplugged it and pitched it in a box which has been on the shelf since Sunday morning (8/27/17). I considered my adventures with CUJO over. This evening I noticed alerts on the CUJO app which was still installed on my phone. The iOS app claims CUJO is logging local network activity from my phone and that my CUJO has blocked to double-click.net just with-in the last two hours (8/29/2017 at 7:29PM). What is going on here? I promptly took screen shots and am sharing it here. How could CUJO block anything with NO POWER, NO ETHERNET CABLE AND from a CARDBOARD BOX! Are their alerts actually a scam? Did it take it over two days to report it? Or are they mixing up data with other users? Who knows... but this is really scary and supsicous... see the attached photos from today! Very troubling for a security tool.