All Ring subscribers were surprised with unexpected charges for "AI Pro" that they didn't opt into and weren't accounting for.
What happened: an internal billing migration into newer subscription plans (not unusual) didn't account for proration charges into higher tier plans and overly charged customers.
What REALLY happened: the original engineering team for Ring subscriptions was fully laid off around mid 2025 and replaced by way cheaper "engineering" personnel. This is probably the first "big launch" of that new team.
Amazon will write this off as cost of doing business and compensate "money saved on not having really good engineers" with "money lost because of incompetence", and I'm pretty sure it'll be on the negative this time. Which is also not unusual (as of late at least).
This is making a few statements that aren't in the article (entire users base, layoffs, migrations). Happy to reply to questions privately.
All Ring subscribers were surprised with unexpected charges for "AI Pro" that they didn't opt into and weren't accounting for.
What happened: an internal billing migration into newer subscription plans (not unusual) didn't account for proration charges into higher tier plans and overly charged customers.
What REALLY happened: the original engineering team for Ring subscriptions was fully laid off around mid 2025 and replaced by way cheaper "engineering" personnel. This is probably the first "big launch" of that new team.
Amazon will write this off as cost of doing business and compensate "money saved on not having really good engineers" with "money lost because of incompetence", and I'm pretty sure it'll be on the negative this time. Which is also not unusual (as of late at least).
This is making a few statements that aren't in the article (entire users base, layoffs, migrations). Happy to reply to questions privately.