Tired of Subscriptions? Here’s How to Break Free!

Highlights

• Performance: The Google Nest Doorbell offers a solid design and decent functionality for users within the Google Home ecosystem.
• AI Issues: Users may experience inconsistent AI notifications and summaries that misidentify events.
• Subscription Benefits: A Google Home Premium subscription is required for advanced features like facial recognition and package detection.
• Installation: Setup is straightforward, especially with existing doorbell wiring.

Google is betting that AI can justify the high price of its smart home security camera subscriptions. The idea is that with AI, your notifications would read more like a human looked outside and told you what they saw. And instead of you scrolling through endless video footage to see what happened, AI can summarize the day for you. Sounds good, right? Sounds great to me.

If you already read my Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen) review, you’ll know the reality, as I experienced it, is underwhelming. Notifications, generated by Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, constantly misidentified my pets and gave weird and wrong descriptions of events taking place in triggered recordings. Daily summaries of my family’s comings and goings made it sound like my house was being mobbed with people and animals. None of it helped justify the pricey cloud storage service that the Google Home Premium (formerly Nest Aware) subscriptions otherwise are. And without those subscriptions, the Nest Cam Outdoor just doesn’t do enough to make it worth buying over some of the more capable, less cloud-reliant alternatives out there.

Does the Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) fare any better? Well, the AI features are still broken the same way, but it may still be a better purchase, depending on how deep your roots are within the walled garden of the Google Home ecosystem. If you’re not a big Google Home user, though, it’s best to look elsewhere.

The Nest Doorbell might be the nicest-looking video doorbell on the market. Its slender, bar-shaped housing is rounded on both ends, curving tightly around the camera and the LED ring-lit doorbell button. The whole thing has the same gentle, pleasingly symmetrical vibe that characterizes the other Google Nest cameras. It’s a lot nicer to look at than chunky, blocky video doorbells from the likes of Ring or Eufy.

Beyond the pretty design, Google’s third-gen wired doorbell has solid specs like a 2K resolution camera sensor with a generous 166-degree diagonal field of view that spreads out over a square aspect ratio. It captures HDR video at 30 frames per second; clips come in vibrant color during the day and, using infrared LEDs, black and white at night. The Nest Doorbell also has a microphone and speaker that enables two-way audio. Connectivity-wise, the camera uses both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy. Thanks to that fast Wi-Fi and its always-on nature, its live feed loads almost instantly in the Google Home app.

Installation is straightforward, assuming you’ve got the requisite doorbell wiring by your door. The Nest Doorbell comes with a mounting plate and a second angled adapter that you can use if you want to have the camera pointing more toward people at your door. Google includes wire extenders if you need them, and the Google Home app, which you use for setup, guides you through installation.

It’s easy to connect the Nest Doorbell to the Google Home app—the only place you’ll ever use it, since this is exclusively a Google Home-compatible product—but a word of advice: Setup requires a QR code included in the box. Lose it and you’ll have to undo all of your physical installation work to get at the same QR code on the back of the doorbell itself.

Once set up, it works like most other video doorbells. You’ll get notifications when someone presses its button, or when the Nest Doorbell detects the sorts of objects—people, pets, and vehicles—you’ve set it to notify you about. Unfortunately, you’ll need a subscription if you want those notifications to feature a zoomed-in preview of whatever triggered the recording, as well as for package detection. Seems stingy, but I guess thumbnail images and machine-learning cardboard box recognition don’t grow on trees?

See Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) at Amazon

Despite those omissions, Google is more generous with free features for the Nest Doorbell than the Nest Cam Outdoor. It works with existing mechanical and digital chimes, for instance, and if you don’t have a functioning chime (like me) then you’ve also got the option to use Google’s smart speakers or displays. They can be configured to announce when someone has rung your doorbell and—in the case of the Google Nest Hub or Hub Max—start streaming the camera’s live feed. Through the display you can also chat with the person who rang your doorbell or, if you’re not into chatting, pick an automated response such as one telling a delivery person to leave the payload there.

In testing, my second-generation Nest Hub was fairly quick to announce that someone had pressed the button, and chatting back and forth with them was easy enough. The only problem was that I had to deal with the Nest Hub itself, which has an interface that’s absolutely sluggish in 2025. Still, it’s a cool integration. Now, if only I could get it to do this on the Google TV-equipped OLED TV in my basement.

And that’s it for the Nest Doorbell, sans subscription. There’s no local recording, although Google did bump the amount of time it’ll keep a recorded event on its servers from a scant three hours in the previous Nest Doorbell to a still-meager six hours. Either way, it’s paltry compared to the free local storage offered for video doorbells from the likes of Eufy, Reolink, Blink, and Aqara.

AI works better on the doorbell camera

If you want more out of the Nest Doorbell, you’ll have to pay for a $10 or $20 per month Google Home Premium subscription. That’ll give you more cloud video storage history—to the tune of 30 days or 60 days, respectively, with the latter also adding 10 days of 24/7 recording that you can search using Gemini.

The lower Standard tier also gets you facial recognition, package detection, and alerts if one of your Google Home devices hears glass breaking or smoke alarms. Those features, as well as local storage, are all things the Reolink Elite I recently reviewed offers for free. In fact, the only thing this subscription nets you that you can’t get with a lot of other cameras is a feature called “Help me create,” which lets you create automations by describing them in a text box in the Google Home app. It worked well for creating simple automations, although one thing that bothers me is that if you ask it to do something that Google Home’s automations aren’t capable of, Gemini won’t tell you that. It’ll just deliver a non-functioning automation.

Eventually, the Standard plan will also include a wide rollout of Gemini to smart speakers. That includes features like Gemini Live, Google’s LLM-powered assistant’s back-and-forth voice chatting feature. As of this review, it’s best to hold off on the subscription if you want access to Gemini on your speakers, as that’s only available to some in early access.

You have to subscribe to the $20/month Google Home Premium Advanced plan to get the headlining AI camera features like daily summaries and AI-created notifications for events. You can read a lot more about my issues with these features over in my review of the Nest Cam Outdoor, but to summarize: Google’s AI system has a tendency to misinterpret what’s happening in front of it, confidently misidentifies animals, and its summaries often describe a person coming and going in a way that makes it seem like I’m having a house party every day.

That said, the system seems more accurate in the context of a video doorbell, perhaps because the camera is closer to the ground and can see what’s in front of it more clearly. Or maybe it’s just because what happens in front of my house is a lot more routine than in the backyard—it’s not trying to make sense of dogs going in and out or people doing yardwork or taking out the trash. Gemini still called my cat a dog sometimes, but it accurately called out when most packages were delivered and even noted that one was from Amazon.

These features are slick when they work, and—again—like I said in my Nest Cam Outdoor review, they’re a clear technological leap forward for home security cameras. But Google’s AI descriptions are still wrong often enough that it’s like paying $20 a month to beta test, and that just doesn’t feel good to me. Heck, even when they aren’t flat wrong, they’re not much more useful than the generic, non-AI descriptors of “Person,” “Person with Package,” or “Activity or animal” of the subscription-free experience. Also, AI video search might be very cool, but as the Reolink Elite shows, you can get similar AI search from an on-device AI model. Like with local video storage, it feels like Google could make a camera with on-device AI search for free, and just didn’t do it because, well, more money via subscriptions is better than less money without them.

Good buy if you’re all-in on Google Home

The Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) serves a pretty specific niche—people heavily invested in the Google Home ecosystem—very well. If you have a home full of Google Nest speakers and smart displays and you love using Google Gemini for things, you’ll probably like the Nest Doorbell. And if you’re already paying for a spendy Google Home Premium plan and don’t have a Nest Doorbell or you’ve only got the first-generation model, it’s a no-brainer.

But for anyone else, the Nest Doorbell isn’t meaningfully useful on its own, and the Google Home Premium subscription is a raw deal at a time when your weary dollar won’t go as far as it used to. It’s hard to feel good about paying $20 a month for useless AI summaries, or for AI-written notifications that can be slightly more helpful than generic “person spotted” alerts when I’m canceling streaming services to save money. I’d much rather buy one of the many cheaper alternative video doorbells that offer local video storage and reactivate my Netflix account for a couple more months with the money I saved.

See Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) at Amazon