I went to Canary’s site to look for a manual, and the pricing on the front page there means this deal makes sense if and only if you don’t expect to get the extended service plan. They’ll just send you a new unit with a full warranty for free if you get the one-year subscription plan. Today’s lesson for Woot staffers: Always link to a manual. 
This company has a very angry installed user base. They sold the devices for two+years including monitoring for free for the lifetime of the devices. Then decided to do a cash grab and disabled all useful features and put them behind a paywall. Essentially turning the devices into paper weights. Oh, and even today the cameras frequently go offline it don’t detect motion or randomly decide to stop recording.
For morality sake don’t support these con artists!!!
There is a class action lawsuit going now. Google “Canary class action lawsuit” and look at the December 2018 news articles. Terrible company.
I have several canary cams. The original from kickstarter or was it Indiegogo. Been a while. Also a couple Flex models. They all work great. Good video. Motion notifications improving. However, the model for sale doesn’t come with the subscription. You don’t need it, and it’s probably best to try the $50 refurbished model to try it out, before deciding whether you want a few cams and to spring for the subscription. The good thing is that the sub covers up to 5 cams if you do decide you want it. I have a Flex cam watching my front door for porch package thieves. Very effective.
I bought two of these on an earlier deal, almost a year ago. Stay away.
- highly unreliable. They simply stop working and need to be re-booted roughly once a week. obviously, you have to notice this first. And then you need to physically be there to reboot them.
- our cats trigger them. We have “person detection” switched on, and in theory they should not get triggered by pets. However, they do. All. The. Time. Almost all of our alerts are false positives.
The previous two points rule them out as security devices. But there are at least two more issues: - sharing these devices on more than one smart phone simply doesn’t work. They are registered under my account. There is a facility to add another person to this, so that both phones are used to “ringfence” the Canarys (this means, the devices get activated when the phone moves away; in theory a very smart feature). However, the activation mail to the other phone simply never shows up. Contrary to what is advertised, the device really works with one phone only.
- The support you get from Canary, even when buying a full subscription, is abysmal. You ask a question. Some sort of a bot replies and plasters you with links where it (the bot) thinks something similar has been asked before. You go through them diligently. None of the links are really pertinent to your issue. So you use the facility to ask a follow-up question. And no reply ever comes.
Stay away!
Received one as a gift a couple years ago. I’ll pile on to the negatives with a few more of my own.
- Glows a bright white LED ring on the bottom while you are away, telling thieves “Hey! Look at me!”
- Geolocation is weak. It often tells me I’m an intruder in my own home.
- Android app is slow and buggy.
I’d stay away, even at this price. Far better options out there.
I have one and has worked with out a problem.
These cams are crap, useless without the $99 annual fee. Canary will send you one free if you prepay for the year of service.
***** Warning***** Canary likes to keep changing their mind as to whether the cloud fee is per household or per camera. That’s why I have 5 if them collecting dust in my box of misfit toys.
I own a canary. Regret it. They have cut back alot on basic features and now charge for them when they promised to be included free. My Canary constantly goes off when i am home by detecting me, eventhough the auto sense feature should know that i am home. Its not worth all the bother.
Well CRAP! I bought one of these and now wish I had read all the comments about how bad they are.
I thought the model I had maybe didn’t support Bluetooth (it wouldn’t activate), now I see that it SHOULD and it’s just not working. Woot, why would you sell this? Did you not know about these issues? there’s a class action lawsuit.
Hi there. As you can read above, some people have them and like them. I’m sorry yours isn’t working. If you don’t figure it out, please contact Woot Customer Service for assistance. From a browser, use the Woot Customer Service form. In the Woot App, choose Account from the bottom navigation and then Support.