I’ve had a five camera Arlo Pro2 system for a few years, and I’ve mostly been happy with it over these years. My gripes have been with battery expense, and life for the cameras, and the Arlo iOS Application which has had a few growing pains here and there. Older versions of the Arlo App were more intuitive in my humble opinion.
I have outgrown the Arlo 5 camera system and wanted to add additional cameras to my account which is currently the free 7day Cloud Recording program. This is great because any video I want to keep, I just save to my iPhone. It’s easy and user friendly. But if you add cameras you have to then switch to a paid subscription, which just doesn’t fly for me. I already dropped a substantial amount of money on the hardware, and am not about to fall into the trap of a subscription service. Without a subscription either the free 7 day subscription or a paid subscription, the system is USELESS. True you can record to a local drive, but you lose all controls for the cameras.
I did find some refurbished 2 camera Arlo systems that still come with the free 7day recording program. Great! I ordered it, and did my happy dance. On receiving the Arlo kit, I found that everything, including the cameras and batteries looked brand new. Nice.
Charged up the batteries, plugged in the router, and associated the cameras with the new Arlo Base Station. Trouble is I got a message that a paid subscription was required. I sent Arlo Support an email for a fix for this, as the Arlo Box and Instructions clearly stated the system came with a free 7 day cloud recording subscription. This first email was on May 22. The 7th response came on June 28th. In between I stated I had an existing Arlo System, and bought this system to supplement my original five cameras. I finally got Arlo support to admit that the system did come with the free 7day subscription but that I’d have to create a new account and then give permissions to this account from the original to allow a second system. It took a month and a week to get them to admit this. By this time I was fed up, and got the original seller to take the refurb system back.
I do not recommend Arlo at this point since their support is so horrible, and their policy is to get you to switch to a paid subscription plan. Once you do this you can never revert to the free plan. At first I thought this was all incompetence of the Arlo Support Team, but now I am pretty sure all the frustration I went through is as designed to force Arlo owner to continue to pay Arlo for the life of the product. It is a crock. I’m pissed, and I will not buy another Arlo system. A fool and his money are soon parted.