Google’s “Nest Aware” camera subscription is going through another round of price increases. This time it’s for international users. There’s no big announcement or anything, just a smattering of email screenshots from various countries on the Nest subreddit. 9to5Google was nice enough to hunt down a pile of the announcements.
Nest Aware is a monthly subscription fee for Google’s Nest cameras. Nest cameras exclusively store all their video in the cloud, and without the subscription, you aren’t allowed to record video 24/7. There are two sets of subscriptions to keep track of: the current generation subscription for modern cameras and the “first generation Nest Aware” subscription for older cameras. To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, in the US, the current free tier only gets you three hours of “event” video—meaning video triggered by motion detection. Even the basic $8-a-month subscription doesn’t get you 24/7 recording—that’s still only 30 days of event video. The “Nest Aware Plus” subscription, at $15 a month in the US, gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording.
The “first-generation” Nest Aware subscription, which is tied to earlier cameras and isn’t available for new customers anymore, is doubling in price in Canada. The basic tier of five days of 24/7 video is going from a yearly fee of CA$50 to CA$110 (the first-generation sub has 24/7 video on every tier). Ten days of video is jumping from CA$80 to CA$160, and 30 days is going from CA$110 to CA$220. These are the prices for a single camera; the first-generation subscription will have additional charges for additional cameras. The current Nest Aware subscription for modern cameras is getting jumps that look similar to the US, with Nest Aware Plus, the mid-tier, going from CA$16 to CA $20 per month, and presumably similar raises across the board.
Japan is seeing jumps, too, with annual Nest Aware for modern cameras going from 6,300 yen to 8,000 yen. Again, there’s no full list of price increases anywhere for every country; at the moment, we’re working from email screenshots, but it sounds like Google is rolling out similar price increases everywhere. The bill increases are happening in about a month, on March 25, 2024. The US already saw a 25–33 percent price increase in September, and it looks like, for the modern Nest Aware plan, the prices internationally are being brought in line with those increases. Users don’t seem too happy about the price increases, naturally.
Google’s austerity era, which CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off in the second half of 2022, has come with a wave of price increases across almost every Google subscription. YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, YouTube TV, Google Workspace, and Google Cloud storage all saw price increases. The one subscription that hasn’t seen a price jump is Google One, the consumer storage plan. Not that we’re trying to give Google any more ideas.
