Paying for Google Home Premium is an absolute non-starter for me

This week, Google launched the next big evolution of Home, bringing in Gemini to replace Assistant, giving the Home app an overhaul, and introducing a slate of new hardware. While there’s a lot I really like about some of these changes, there’s also a huge downside that now has me looking at Google Home in an increasingly negative light: Home Premium subscriptions.

What’s the problem with with subscriptions?

I am not a big fan of subscriptions. Like many of us, I probably have too many already, and would be wise to pare that list down (I’m looking hard at you right now, Disney Plus). But I also understand their value, and as a creator who likes to see other creators get compensated, it makes sense to me to pay a subscription for access to a steady flow of new content.

For something like YouTube Premium, which brings me hours of brand-new content every single day, I can easily justify the subscription. Content subscriptions make sense. Some may be much better deals than others, but the idea’s not objectionable to me.

It’s when we introduce the idea of subscriptions for software that the argument starts becoming a lot harder for me to make. I still really like the idea of software ownership, and prefer to buy games I want à la carte, for instance, rather than paying for temporary access through something like Xbox Game Pass. I suspect that here people start getting into the trap of paying for options, rather than stuff they’re actually using — it feels nice to have access to a huge library of titles, but where’s the value if you’re grinding away at the same one all month long?

Storage was always a lousy reason for a camera subscription

Home Premium is evolving out of Nest Aware, and while that did a few different things, the big hook for many users was its cloud storage, offering up to 10 days of 24/7 recording for wired cameras, and up to 60 days of events. Google is far from the only camera maker that heavily pushes subscriptions like this, and if cloud solutions are just one of several storage options available to users, I might be fine with it. But with Nest Cams, it’s been “pay for Google’s storage, or live with only event notifications.”

Contrast that with something like Wyze cameras, where you can drop a microSD card (that costs basically nothing) into one of the company’s already very affordable cameras. Instead of accessing my clips over the cloud, the app just connects me directly to my camera, where I can instantly access all its footage — without paying one dime in ongoing costs. Think about it: Your smartphone is connected to the internet. Your camera is connected to the internet. Why introduce unnecessary third parties here when you can just access your recordings directly?

Or there’s the option of setting up some sort of local hub. I’ve done something like this with Arlo cameras, avoiding the subscription there by just popping a big USB flash drive into the Arlo base station, and locally archiving my camera footage.

If you’d rather just pay for the convenience of the cloud, awesome! More power to you. But that doesn’t make it suck any less when a camera manufacturer just straight-up refuses to even give us the choice between local and cloud storage.

Doesn’t AI change things? Don’t we need to keep paying for access?

Kind of. But no, not really.

Home Premium is a lot of things, which isn’t making this an easy conversation to have, and even when it comes to Gemini and AI, the service is using these tools in a number of different ways. But just looking at video processing — no, we really don’t need a cloud-based solution to tell us when someone’s dropping a package off, or to recognize a family of skunks in the driveway.

This year at IFA, eufy showed off its AI Core, an upgrade for the company’s network-attached camera storage solutions that adds local AI processing to their bag of tricks. You just plug it in, and then all your camera footage never has to leave your home to be analyzed by advanced AI.

Does something like this represent a significant upfront investment? Absolutely, but a minimum of $100 a year for Home Premium is not nothing, either, and I would hugely prefer if Google similarly presented a choice between something that’s local, private, and with higher initial costs, and the sort of cloud-based subscription offerings it exclusively went with.

While there’s definitely some value to all the non-camera stuff that Gemini is doing, especially with devices that will support Gemini Live, it’s still hard for me to justify a recurring fee to access these when Google makes so very much of Gemini — including Live — free to use on our Android mobile devices. But as I pick away at all the other pieces of Home Premium that I struggle to justify paying a subscription for, it just becomes that more difficult of a sell. Gemini Live’s nice, but it’s not $100 a year nicer than not-Live.

Stuck in a subscription mentality

Pivoting away from Google Home for a moment, I’m currently reviewing a smart home device that also involves a subscription component, and while I’m trying to avoid spoilers here (I’d still like you to read that review, after all), this one just really set me off. It’s a product with an app that works perfectly well locally, letting you control it over Bluetooth with your phone. And the hardware even has native support for Wi-Fi connectivity.

Practically, there is nothing at all that’s preventing the app from letting you access the hardware when you’re away from home — all the pieces are there — except, the company has decided that off-site access is worth paying a premium for, and locked it behind a subscription.

That sucks. That feels like just such a bald-faced case of monetizing something that has no business being monetized. I was complaining about this to a colleague who had used the company’s other devices in an international market, and apparently this subscription money-grab was an entirely new addition for the US. The way she framed it, Europeans are resistant to the idea of subscriptions like this, while Americans are far, far more conditioned to accept subscriptions as just part of the cost of using a device.

I don’t want any more of that happening in my smart home. I think we all need to take a long, hard look at the actual value these subscription services are adding to the products we use, and demanding that manufacturers justify increasingly subscription-only approaches.

I appreciate that many of these products and systems require long-term support on the back end, and that doesn’t come free to companies. But figure out your expenses and bake that into the initial cost; I will always prefer paying more upfront than paying indefinitely via subscription.

Home Premium looks very useful, and I’m sure I’ll be a little curious about the experiences I’m missing out on. But I just can’t get behind this incessant push for subscription-or-nothing solutions to features and services that don’t fundamentally require them.