With its impressive array of smart features, the Nest Doorbell—previously known as Nest Hello—offers person detection, facial recognition, package tracking, and a new wireless doorbell option. These characteristics make it a reliable front-door sentry for any smart home, especially when combined with fresh color options and hardware that can withstand extremely low temperatures. However, the question remains: do these features make the Nest Doorbell worth its price? And what is the actual cost to utilize those state-of-the-art features? When we look at the Nest Doorbell’s equipment costs, the Nest Aware subscription, and other things you might want to think about before purchasing one, we’ll cover all of that and more. Now let’s begin.
Does Nest Make Good Doorbells?
Among its many accolades, Nest by Google is most recognized as a potent home automation brand, particularly with regard to Google-powered smart homes. But if Alexa is a feature of your smart home, we suggest looking into these leading manufacturers instead.
The Nest Doorbell Costs How Much?
The Nest battery and wired doorbells are priced at $179 and $229, respectively, to match competitors in the market. All of the Nest doorbells are less expensive than the $249.99 Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2, one of its main rivals. The Nest Cam Outdoor, which typically retails for $199, is slightly less expensive than the wired doorbell. When we compare the features of an outdoor camera with a wired doorbell, we believe the price difference is negligible.
However, let’s keep things in perspective: spending $179 to $229 on a single device is not insignificant. The majority of people purchase video doorbells for security purposes, especially to stop package theft. Our own research on package theft indicates that almost 4 out of 10 adult Americans have experienced package theft from their doorsteps, stoops, lawns, or porches. According to a different survey, 43% of Americans reported having packages stolen in 2020. We believe that purchasing the Nest smart video doorbell was a safe investment, as the average value of each package that was stolen was $136. The Nest Doorbell is a great deal, especially considering all the extra features that help us communicate with our loved ones at the door while also warding off porch pirates.
Costs of Installation
Professional installation is not necessary for the Nest Doorbell, just like it is not for any other Nest product. Because of the comprehensive in-app instructions that walked us through every step, we were able to set it up independently in less than 30 minutes. Since the wired option obviously required some drilling and wiring, Nest provides professional installation services through OnTech for $99.99, a fairly standard cost in the industry, for those uncomfortable with those tasks.
For renters without the option to hardwire a doorbell, the wireless doorbell is the ideal home security solution and only requires a few minutes of installation time.
Add-ons
Although Google doesn’t sell accessories specifically for the Nest Doorbell, we still advise purchasing a Nest-branded smart speaker, such as the $49 Google Nest Mini, for an improved experience. The Nest Doorbell can be chimed by smart speakers. If the Familiar Faces feature is enabled (which requires Nest Aware), they can even announce the guest’s name.
Additionally, live feeds and playback recordings from the Nest Doorbell camera are displayed on smart displays such as the $99.99 Nest Hub (assuming we have a Nest Aware subscription). With Google’s networked smart home strategy, every room, camera, and gadget functions as a single unit. We adore how the camera display on the Nest Hub, which never leaves our kitchen counter, matches our Nest Doorbell.
Including Nest Aware in the Long-Term Costs
To be honest, we weren’t able to utilize the smart doorbell to its fullest extent until we enrolled in Nest Aware. For Nest video doorbells, cameras, and Google devices, the Nest Aware program is a subscription service that unlocks a plethora of smart features in addition to cloud video storage. Because the Nest Doorbell lacked any local storage options—such as a hard drive or micro-SD card slot—we determined that Nest Aware was essential. We were only able to view images, or “snapshots,” of our livestream in the Nest app for a mere three hours in the absence of Nest Aware. Because video evidence is far more valuable than screenshots in a criminal investigation, upgrading to Nest Aware is imperative.
Our video doorbell saved motion-triggered event videos for 30 days with the $6/month Nest Aware plan. We were able to access 60 days of event history and 10 days of 24/7 video history after we upgraded to the Nest Aware Plus plan, which cost $12 per month. This meant that our Nest Doorbell was continuously recording for days at a time.
Our Nest Aware plan unlocked three more smart features for our Nest Doorbell in addition to providing cloud video storage:
- Alerts for Familiar Faces: Our Nest Doorbell let us know when someone we knew was going to be at our door and warned us when someone we didn’t know was coming. This simplified the determining whether to use the Nest app to check in while we were away.
- Zones of activity: We were able to delineate boundaries around the areas we wished to protect with the Nest Doorbell. That way, we could stop worrying that Becky would set off our doorbell notifications while jogging down the crowded sidewalk past our brownstone.
- Tracking packages: Our boxes spent less time on our front step because we received notifications at the same time as our packages. This prevented package theft and made it easier for us to monitor our online orders.
The subscription service was made even more worthwhile by these clever features, especially in light of the recent advancements in facial recognition technology.
The Nest Doorbell: What We Adore
The Nest Doorbell notifies its users when someone presses the doorbell button or when it detects movement, just like any other video doorbell. However, it does so much more than that. Upon testing the Nest Doorbell, we found several other helpful features.
Battery-operated Alternative
The latest addition to Google’s video doorbell lineup, the battery-operated Nest Doorbell is everything we’ve been hoping for. We prefer video doorbells that don’t require hardwiring because we rent. The fact that apartment owners can now enjoy doorbell chimes by pairing their battery-operated Nest Doorbells with Nest Hubs or Nest Minis is another great feature. The sound of a ringing doorbell is the epitome of “home,” and renters shouldn’t be exempt from this rule.
Outstanding Video Quality
The crisp videos that our Nest Doorbell recorded pleased us. The Nest Doorbell is unavoidable in any situation thanks to its 1600 by 1200 aspect ratio, 160-degree viewing angle, infrared night vision, and HDR technology, eliminating glare and shadows. The Nest Doorbell provided us with a clear view of who was outside our front door, whether it was a child selling cookies or a man delivering a package.
Person Identification
Getting the notifications just right is one of the main problems we’ve found with video doorbell setup, but the Nest Doorbell’s person detection feature made it simple. The Nest Doorbell only notified us when a person was involved in any movement on our front lawn or stoop, as opposed to constantly disturbing us. Receiving fewer, more pertinent alerts was greatly appreciated.
How Our Smart Home and the Nest Doorbell Work Together
We used the Nest Doorbell in conjunction with our Nest Mini, which served as a chime, in our very own smart home. Concurrently, the Nest Doorbell’s feed appeared enormous on a bigger screen thanks to the Chromecast connected to our TV. Just a few instances of how the Nest Doorbell works with our Google Assistant-focused smart home are shown above. Additionally, we gave it commands just by speaking, saying things like: “Hey, Google, show me my front door.”
- “Hey Google, please turn off my display in the kitchen.”
- “Hey, Google, turn on the home mode for my Nest Doorbell.”
- “Alright, Google, I’ll stop streaming when I get home.” (This method works only if you have sufficient storage to use a Nest Plus.) Conscious of ongoing streaming.)
What about Alexa users? So, don’t feel excluded just yet. Though not as extensively, the Nest Doorbell was also compatible with our Alexa-enabled smart displays, such as the Fire TV, Echo Show 8, and Fire Tablet. On our Amazon Fire devices, the voice commands were limited to live streaming and viewing our most recent videos that had been recorded. All in all, if you use Alexa, you might want to think about getting a video doorbell from Ring instead of a Nest Doorbell since the former was made to work more with the Google platform than the Amazon smart home ecosystem.
How the Nest Doorbell Compares to Other Products
Regarding Ring, the video doorbell company owned by Amazon released the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and 3 Plus, which retail for $200 and $230, respectively. They are competitive with Nest Doorbells at those price points. Let’s compare each other to see how they stack up. The doorbells from Ring and Nest are nearly identical in terms of compatibility. For renters or those without pre-existing doorbell wiring, Ring and Nest provide both battery-operated and hardwired doorbell setup options.
But when it comes to features, the Nest Doorbell wins out. Even with the premium Ring Protect Plus plan, the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and 3 Plus lack the Nest Doorbell’s facial recognition and package tracking features, despite sharing a person detection feature with it. Furthermore, unlike the Nest Doorbell with a Nest Aware Plus subscription, Ring doorbells aren’t able to record continuously. While the Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus’s four-second “pre-roll” videos might offer some context for the moments before recorded events, they are not the same as continuous, round-the-clock recording.
What Do We Think of the Nest Doorbell, then?
Despite being relatively new to the market, the wired Nest Doorbell remains one of the best video doorbells available. It was introduced in 2018. It integrates with the Google Assistant platform seamlessly and is stylish, useful, and intelligent. We don’t see the Nest Doorbell going out of style anytime soon, especially now that a wireless option is available. Having said that, we weren’t thrilled that the Nest Doorbell requires a Nest Aware subscription to fulfill our requirements for a video doorbell, which include having access to free cloud storage for longer than three hours. The Nest Doorbell is something to think about if you can afford the monthly or annual fee. The good news is that the updated Nest Aware is now more affordable than ever.
