Blink vs Wyze: what a year costs at every tier

Put Blink's plan page beside Wyze's and one line matches to the cent. Blink Plus ai is $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year. Wyze Cam Unlimited Pro is $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year. Two companies that agree on nothing else — not on storage, not on how many cameras a plan covers, not even on whether to print a yearly price — land on the same number twice.

Below that top tier they separate, and not the way the monthly prices suggest. Wyze is cheaper everywhere. It is also, at the plan most people start on, cheaper for a quarter of the history.

Is Wyze cheaper than Blink?

Yes, at every tier below the top one — by $1 a month at the entry and $2 in the middle. Wyze Cam Plus is $2.99 a month against Blink Basic at $3.99, and Wyze Cam Unlimited is $9.99 against Blink Plus at $11.99.

Over a year the gap is wider than it looks, because both companies discount the annual option by almost exactly the same amount. Wyze Cam Unlimited is $99.99 a year against Blink Plus at $119.99 — twenty dollars, every year, for plans that both cover every camera you own.

That near-identical annual discount is not a coincidence and it is not new. Blink's two original tiers save 16.5% and 16.6% against paying monthly. Wyze's three save 16.42%, 16.59% and 16.63%. The same pattern turned up against Ring: annual is roughly ten months' money for twelve months of service, across brands that compete on everything else.

How long does each keep my footage?

Blink keeps up to 60 days on all four of its plans. Wyze keeps 14 on the plan most people buy. That is the trade the dollar difference is really buying, and neither plan page puts the two numbers side by side.

Blink lists "cloud video storage for up to 60 days" against Basic at $3.99 a month — its cheapest tier. Wyze lists "14-day event video recordings" against Cam Plus at $2.99. To get 60 days from Wyze you need Cam Unlimited Pro, at $19.99 a month.

So the honest version of the comparison is this. Blink's $3.99 plan and Wyze's $19.99 plan hold footage for the same length of time. If your reason for wanting a plan is that you might not check the app for three weeks, that single line decides the whole thing.

What does Blink's first-year price mean?

That the price goes up in month thirteen. Blink's two new ai tiers advertise a first-year figure and renew at a higher one, and Blink prints both on the same page.

Basic ai is $49.99 for the first year and $69.99 after — a rise of $20, or 40%. Plus ai is $149.99 then $199.99, a rise of $50, or 33%. The renewal figures are not hidden; they sit beside the discounted ones in smaller type, which is more disclosure than most makers offer and still less than most buyers will read.

Worth being fair about: an introductory year is a normal offer and Blink does say so. The reason it belongs in a comparison is that the first-year number is the one that gets quoted, and it is not the number you pay for as long as you keep the camera.

Why is there no yearly price on Wyze's plan page?

Because Wyze's plan table lists monthly prices only. The annual figures do exist — on Wyze's product pages and inside a collapsed FAQ — but not in the table built for choosing a plan.

This is the second time it has come up here. Cam Plus annual rose 50% without the plan page showing it, and Wyze quotes two different annual prices for Cam Unlimited on two of its own pages: $99 in one place, $99.99 in another. Ninety-nine cents is not a scandal. Publishing two numbers is a maintenance problem, and omitting the yearly option from the page where people choose is a design decision.

Blink, for its part, prints monthly and yearly side by side for all four tiers. On the narrow question of who tells you what a year costs, Blink is ahead.

Are Blink's ai features available everywhere?

No — Blink excludes Illinois. Its plan page states the ai features are "not available for customers in Illinois due to state-specific legislation", and that they need a mobile device with English as the primary language.

Illinois has the strictest biometric privacy law in the United States, and a feature set that describes what it sees in your video is exactly the kind of thing it governs. If you live there, two of Blink's four plans lose the capability they are named for while still costing $6.99 and $19.99 a month.

The whole comparison, in one table

Every figure below was read from each company's own page on 19 August 2026. Where a figure is not on the plan page, that is stated rather than filled in from somewhere else.

Which should I pick?

Wyze, if 14 days of history is enough. Blink, if it is not. That single condition decides it, and everything above is the working behind it.

Wyze is cheaper at every tier — a dollar a month at the entry, two in the middle, twenty dollars a year on the all-cameras plan. Nothing in Blink's favour outweighs that if you check your app inside a fortnight. But if you want longer, Blink's cheapest plan at $3.99 holds 60 days, and matching that on Wyze means Cam Unlimited Pro at $19.99 — five times the price for the same window.

One caveat on the ai tiers either way. Blink's advertised $149.99 is a first-year figure, so compare $199.99 against Wyze's $199.99 if you plan to keep the camera longer than a year. At that point the two are the same price and the decision goes back to retention, which by then is a tie.

Is there a third answer?

A camera that records to a card or a hub you own has no tier to compare. No renewal price, no retention window to check, no plan page to re-read next year.

That is the subject of which cameras work without a subscription. The trade is real and worth stating plainly: no cloud history unless you build it, and the backups become yours to remember.

Cameras with no tier to compare

Specifications as published by each maker, read on 19 August 2026. Nothing here was tested and nothing is ranked — these record to storage you own, which is the point of the section above.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This costs you nothing and never affects what is covered here.

How this was checked

Blink's four plans, their monthly and yearly prices, the first-year figures, the 60-day retention and the Illinois exclusion were read on 19 August 2026 from https://blinkforhome.com/plans. Blink's page had moved: the previously documented /pages/subscription now returns 404.

Wyze's three self-monitoring tiers and their monthly prices, and the 14-day and 60-day retention figures, were read the same day from https://www.wyze.com/pages/service-plans. The Cam Unlimited annual price of $99.99 comes from https://www.wyze.com/products/cam-unlimited. Note that the "30-day" on Wyze's plans page is the length of the free trial, not a retention window.

The percentages are ours, computed from the figures above: $2.99 × 12 = $35.88 against $29.99 is 16.42%; $9.99 × 12 = $119.88 against $99.99 is 16.59%; $3.99 × 12 = $47.88 against $39.99 is 16.48%; $11.99 × 12 = $143.88 against $119.99 is 16.60%. No cameras or subscriptions were purchased for this article, and no price here is taken from a review site.

Two brands are missing from this comparison on purpose. eufy no longer links a membership page from its own navigation, and Reolink has moved its plan prices inside a signed-in application. Neither can be quoted from source, so neither is quoted at all.

Corrections

If either company changes a price, this page gets the new figure and a new date rather than a quiet edit. If a number here is wrong, tell us and it is corrected the same way.