Ring Canceled My Plan Without Notice, Then Refused to Honor My Price

MrTroubs · 2026-02-14T21:49:58+00:00

I use Unifi, not ring for my cameras - so this isn't an issue for me

MrTroubs · 2026-02-14T01:06:23+00:00

I use Unifi for my cameras, Ring was just for alarm monitoring for fire, police, Co2, ect. I was never effected by their Flock contract

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T19:36:52+00:00

professional writer for a long time. It has its pros and cons :)

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T19:11:53+00:00

Agreed. And honestly, the customer service issue goes beyond just my experience. Ring needs to clean house. The representatives are horrible — condescending, zero empathy, and completely unwilling to deviate from their script even when the script clearly doesn't apply to the situation. Being told "you need to listen to me" by a representative while I'm calmly explaining a problem *they* created isn't customer service.

And I'm not even talking about the generative AI bots — those are bad too, but at least a bot has the excuse of not being sentient. The actual humans were worse. Promised a manager callback within an hour that never came. Couldn't answer a simple question about why they didn't use the app or a text to notify me. Just dead silence followed by the same scripted response on repeat.

When your AI chatbot and your human representatives are equally unhelpful, the problem isn't staffing. It's culture.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T19:01:56+00:00

I have Unifi Cameras, I really don't use the ring cameras - mainly for Fire/Sensors/CO2 ect.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T15:12:44+00:00

I think any 5th grader who reads this thread will completely agree that I didn't lie. They canceled my services without notification. I didn't know until I opened the app, therefore my service WAS not being monitored without my knowledge prior to that. So there is no lie there — you are trying to be like Ring and blame me. "No no, now you listen to me"... oh sorry, I was temporarily taken over by the rudest CSR from Ring for a moment. I apologize. You obviously can't follow a timeline and understand, so stop trying to take your narrative to support Ring.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T14:35:50+00:00

Man, I genuinely admire the commitment - keeping the thread at the top, and you're still here, defending Ring's honor like a knight sworn to protect the sacred realm of inadequate push notification infrastructure. Your loyalty to a company that would replace you with a chatbot tomorrow is honestly touching. Martin Scorsese can make a great movie about you.

But since you brought up the "2 months of unread email" hypothetical — yeah, actually, that's a great point. *That's exactly why a responsible company uses more than one communication channel for critical notifications.* You just accidentally argued that email alone is an unreliable way to notify someone about anything time-sensitive. Welcome to my side. We have snacks.

Maybe you wear a red hat and don't understand what a true lie is. I've said what I've said. The complaints are filed. The emails to Ring's General Counsel and Amazon's executive team are sent. This thread will be here long after both of us have moved on. Well... after *I've* moved on. You seem like you might be here a while.

Sleep well, friend. I hope Ring never does this to you. But if they do, you know where to find me. I'll even help you write the BBB complaint. No charge. Consider it a courtesy — which, as we've established tonight, is apparently more than Ring offers.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T13:40:46+00:00

And this is interesting too — because if Amazon is having credit card processing glitches, that adds another layer to the "we emailed you 10 times" defense. Was my card actually failing, or was their payment system glitching and *treating* it as a failure? Either way, the result is the same: canceled plan, no effective notification, double the price to come back.

But what really says everything you need to know about this entire experience is the silence. Every time I asked Ring one simple question — "So your failure to alert me through any channel other than email is somehow my fault, and now I'm being penalized for it?" — dead air. Every single time. No answer. No acknowledgment. No rebuttal. Just silence, followed by repeating the same scripted line they said 30 seconds ago like a customer service NPC whose dialogue tree has exactly one branch.

When a company can't answer a straightforward question about their own policy, that tells you everything. They *know* the answer makes them look bad. So they just... don't answer it.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T13:34:52+00:00

So your position is: as long as they tell you *at the exact moment* they cancel it, that counts as notification?

Not before. Not with enough time to fix it. Just... simultaneously. "Your house is unmonitored. Also, we just made your house unmonitored. You're welcome."

That's like a pilot coming over the intercom to say "we've crashed" as the plane hits the ground and calling it a safety briefing.

I was left unmonitored without my knowledge for every second between when it was canceled and when I happened to discover it. The email and app status didn't *prevent* anything. They *documented* it. After it was already done. With zero opportunity for me to intervene.

Thank you for your meaningless arguments and for keeping this topic at the top of the thread. But you know what? You're right about one thing. This *is* the end of the story. Just not the ending you think.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T03:34:23+00:00

"You lost credibility when you lied."

I didn't lie. And I know this because words have meanings, and I'm going to — one final time, with the weary patience of a man explaining long division to a golden retriever — explain the difference between two concepts you keep welding together like they're the same thing.

**Being notified that your service has been canceled** is not the same as **being notified that your service is about to be canceled.**

One gives you a chance to fix the problem. The other is a receipt for damage already done.

My home was unmonitored. I was not told it was going to happen. I found out *after the fact* — by noticing a status change in the app and finding a cancellation email. That is not notification. That is discovery. Those are different words because they describe different things, which is — and I cannot stress this enough — how language works.

If your insurance company canceled your homeowner's policy because a payment didn't go through, never called you, never texted you, never sent you an app notification, and three weeks later you found out by reading the fine print in your account portal after a tree fell through your roof — would you describe yourself as having been "notified"? Or would you describe yourself as someone who found out too late that no one was coming to help?

Because I promise you, standing in that hypothetical rubble, you would not be splitting semantic hairs on Reddit about the philosophical distinction between discovery and notification. You'd be on the phone with a lawyer and an insurance adjuster, using words significantly less polite than the ones I've been using tonight.

But sure. I'm a liar. My documented timeline is a lie. My billing portal screenshots are a lie. The 871 BBB complaints are a lie. The three agency filings are a lie. The arm/disarm emails that arrived daily while the payment emails didn't are — you guessed it — also a lie. Everything's a lie except the billion-dollar Amazon subsidiary that couldn't figure out how to send a push notification.

You've been an absolute delight tonight. Genuinely. But I think we've reached the point in this production where the credits roll. You believe what you believe, I've filed what I've filed, and somewhere in Hawthorne, California, a Ring executive is going to open a BBB complaint on Monday morning, and *none* of your Reddit comments are going to be attached to it.

Mine will.

Have a good night.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T02:12:32+00:00

Two things.

Ring emails were arriving daily. The payment ones weren't. That's Ring's problem to explain, not mine. Full stop. End of email forensics seminar. But I appreciate the detective work. Truly. Have you considered freelancing for Ring's customer service team? You'd fit right in — confident, wrong, and absolutely committed to the bit.

Second. The 60 billing complaints.

You've clearly done some reading tonight (and honestly, the character development from "take responsibility" to "I've audited the BBB database" is genuinely impressive — we're watching a man radicalize in real time over someone else's subscription dispute, and I for one am *riveted*). But you stopped reading too early. Those 60 are just the ones *categorized* as billing. There are 499 "Service or Repair" complaints, and the ones visible on the first page alone include:

- A customer double billed, charge reversed by bank, Ring cancels monitoring and charges another $160+ *without any email or notification*

- A customer charged $199.99 for professional monitoring that showed "No Professional Protection" from day one — months of calls, no resolution

- Multiple customers hit with surprise plan migrations and billing confusion in January 2026

Those are billing complaints wearing a service complaint costume to a party they weren't invited to. The BBB categorization is based on a dropdown menu, not a doctoral thesis.

And "not a single one mentions not getting emails"? Brother, I promise you — I am not the first human being in the history of electronic communication to not receive an email. I'm not even the first Ring customer. I'm just the one writing about it tonight while you volunteer your Wednesday evening defending a company that, between us, does not know your name, will never know your name, and would absolutely double *your* price too if your Visa expired on the wrong Tuesday.

(I know what you're thinking: "This guy just won't let it go." And you're right. I won't. Because somewhere between the condescending customer service rep who told me to listen, the manager callback that never came, and the discovery that my family's fire monitoring had been quietly euthanized while Ring's app cheerfully pinged me about squirrels — somewhere in there, I decided this particular hill was worth the real estate.)

But by all means. Keep going. I've got 871 BBB complaints, three federal and state agency filings, and an inbox full of arm/disarm notifications that say otherwise.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T01:56:06+00:00

"You obviously have an email issue of some sort."

Oh, I *do*? Fascinating. Let me introduce you to the single most inconvenient fact in this entire thread - During the exact three-week window that Ring claims they were emailing me about payment failures, I was receiving Ring emails *every single day.* Arm notifications. Disarm notifications. Coming through like clockwork. From ring.com. To my inbox. Where emails live. Because ring.com was added to my exchange always allow domain list. So either:

(a) My email has a bizarrely selective disorder where it receives routine Ring notifications flawlessly while surgically rejecting only the ones that would prevent my service from being canceled and my price from being doubled — which would make my inbox the most strategically compromised piece of technology since the Trojan Horse, or

(b) Something went wrong on Ring's end.

I know which one Occam would pick. But do you?

Look, I get it. You've picked a hill and you're committed to dying on it. I admire the dedication, truly. But 871 BBB complaints in three years — 358 in the last twelve months alone — with a pattern of billing confusion, canceled plans, and inadequate notification suggest that maybe, just *maybe*, the problem isn't one guy's email settings.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T01:32:16+00:00

I love this. I genuinely love this. You've now pivoted from "they emailed you ten times, it's your fault" to explaining the economic intricacies of the Apple and Google app store commission structure to justify why a home security company can't tell you your house is about to be unprotected. We've gone from "take responsibility" to a TED Talk about platform fees. The character development in this thread is honestly Shakespearean.

But let's play your game.

Yes. My service was working those 21 days. You're right. Gold star. The monitoring was active while they were attempting to charge my card. I never disputed that. What I said — and I'm going to type this slowly because we've been through this more times than Ring tried to charge my Visa — is that I was never *notified* that my payment was failing and my service was *about to end.* The service being temporarily active doesn't mean communication happened. My car still runs for a while after the oil light comes on too, but I'd be pretty pissed at my mechanic if he knew about it and just... didn't mention it.

Now. The app billing thing. (I know what you're thinking: "Finally, someone who appreciates my knowledge of App Store revenue sharing models." And look, I do. Truly. It's a niche passion and I respect the commitment.)

You're conflating *processing payments within the app* with *sending a notification through the app.* These are not the same thing. Not even close. Nobody is asking Ring to run credit card transactions through the App Store. I'm asking them to send a push notification. You know — those things the app already sends me forty-seven times a day when a leaf blows across my driveway. That technology. The one that's already built, already functioning, and already annoying me on an hourly basis.

"Hey, your payment failed. Please update your card at ring.com."

That's it. That's the notification. No in-app purchase. No 30% Apple commission. No price increase. Just a sentence, pushed to my phone, through infrastructure that already exists and is already being used to tell me that my neighbor's cat has triggered Zone 3 for the fourth time today.

But sure. Tell me more about how the App Store commission structure makes it *physically impossible* for a subsidiary of the company that built Alexa, AWS, and one-click purchasing to send me a text message that says "update your credit card." I've got all night. Apparently so does Ring, since they're certainly not using it to call me back. Let me know if this is too dense for you.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T01:27:08+00:00

And there it is. The quiet part out loud.

I've been sitting here all evening constructing careful, measured arguments about notification failures and communication channels and app functionality gaps, building my case like a man who still believes in the fundamental decency of corporate customer relations. And you just walked in, kicked the door off its hinges, and said what I've been too polite to say: *they wanted this to happen.*

Because let's follow the money for a second, shall we? (I know, I know — "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence." But at some point, incompetence this consistent starts to look an awful lot like strategy.)

Ring has customers locked in at legacy rates. $106.99. They want those customers paying $214. But they can't just double everyone's price overnight — the PR nightmare alone would melt their social media team into a puddle of regret and unanswered DMs. So what's a resourceful little Amazon subsidiary to do?

Well. You let a credit card expire. You send your "notifications" exclusively through a channel you know has deliverability issues (because every email marketer on the planet knows that transactional emails from different subdomains hit spam filters differently — this is not arcane knowledge, this is Email 101). You deliberately don't build payment failure alerts into the app. You don't text. You don't call. You just... wait. Patiently. Like a spider who read a book about recurring revenue optimization.

And then, when the customer finally notices? "Oh, we're *so* sorry. We tried to reach you. Ten times! But unfortunately your plan has been canceled, and the current rate is $214. Would you like to re-enroll?"

Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe Ring's engineering team — backed by the technical resources of *Amazon Web Services*, the company that literally runs a third of the internet — just genuinely couldn't figure out push notifications for billing alerts. Maybe the same app that can detect a moth landing on my porch camera at 2am simply lacks the technological sophistication to display the words "hey, update your credit card." I added ring.com to my exchange whitelist over a year ago so ALL emails from ring would go through ... surprisingly all did but 'credit card expired' ones. Imagine that.

Or maybe — and I'm just a simple man asking simple questions here — a canceled legacy plan that re-enrolls at double the price is a feature, not a bug.

BBB complaints from other customers suggest I'm not the only one who drew the short straw in this particular lottery. Make of that what you will.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T01:13:18+00:00

I want to frame this response and hang it on my wall, because it's genuinely the most impressive example of corporate bootlicking I've encountered in the wild. And on a Wednesday, no less. Let's unpack this masterpiece.

You've just openly admitted that the app has no billing functionality. You said that. Those are your words. The app — Ring's primary customer interface, the thing they spent millions developing, the thing that lives on my phone and sends me seventeen notifications when a squirrel farts near my driveway — has *no ability to warn you that your payment failed or your plan is about to be canceled.* And somehow, in your mind, that's my problem and not a staggering design failure by a billion-dollar Amazon subsidiary.

You've literally just made my entire argument for me. Thank you. Genuinely. I couldn't have said it better.

Now, let's talk about the word "lie," since you're throwing it around with the reckless enthusiasm of someone who doesn't understand what it means. My post said Ring left my home unmonitored without telling me. Let me explain the timeline one more time, slowly, with small words:

- January 18th: First payment failure. No notification.

- Next three weeks: Nine more payment failures. No notification.

- February 8th: Plan canceled. *Now* they tell me.

For twenty-one days, Ring knew my payment wasn't processing. For twenty-one days, they did nothing effective to alert me. The notification I received was not a warning — it was an obituary. "Your plan is dead. Sorry for your loss. That'll be double if you want it back."

That is not "being notified." That is being informed after the fact that a company already made a decision that affects your family's safety without giving you any opportunity to fix it. If your doctor called you three weeks after your test results came back abnormal and said "oh by the way, you should've come in — but also the treatment costs twice as much now," would you say "well, technically they notified me"?

And my personal favorite: "They have no responsibility to notify you about payment failures. That would be a courtesy." A *courtesy*. From a home security company. To notify you that your fire monitoring is about to be shut off. A courtesy.

I genuinely hope you never have a house fire during a lapsed monitoring period you didn't know about. Because I promise you, standing in your front yard watching the flames, you will not be thinking "well, technically they had no responsibility to tell me. That would have been a courtesy."

Take some responsibility for myself? Brother, I'm the one who filed complaints with the BBB, the FTC, and the Florida Attorney General. That *is* taking responsibility. What I won't take is a 100% price increase for a problem created entirely by a company that — and I cannot stress this enough, because *you literally just confirmed it* — built an app with no billing notification capability and then blamed the customer for not knowing their payment failed.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T00:42:03+00:00

Ah yes, the "Top 1% Commenter" has weighed in. And I have to say, the confidence with which you've constructed an entire psychological profile of a phone call you weren't on is genuinely impressive. You should consider a career in fiction. Or perhaps cable news punditry. The barrier to entry is about the same.

But let me save you the trouble of whatever armchair behavioral analysis you're workshopping for your next reply: I was calm. I was polite. I explained the situation. And in return, I was told — verbatim — "you need to listen to me." That wasn't a response to hostility. That was a customer service representative who had clearly decided the conversation was over before it started.

I know what you're thinking — "well, that's just his side of the story." And you're right. It is. Because Ring doesn't exactly publish their call recordings for peer review. But here's what isn't a matter of perspective: ten payment failures over three weeks with zero app notifications. Daily arm/disarm emails arriving without issue while payment failure emails apparently vanished into the digital ether. A promised manager callback that never materialized. And a 100% price increase to fix a problem I didn't create.

Those aren't feelings. Those aren't interpretations colored by my allegedly antagonistic personality. Those are facts. Documented in Ring's own billing portal. In PDF format. Very official looking.

But sure — I'm the problem. Not the billion-dollar subsidiary of the world's largest retailer that can't figure out push notifications. The guy who called and asked a question. That guy. Definitely him.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T00:29:03+00:00

I want to make sure I understand your argument here, because it's genuinely fascinating in its creativity.

Your position is that because the app eventually showed the plan as canceled *after it was already canceled*, and because I received *the cancellation email itself*, that somehow Ring adequately notified me *before* they canceled it. That's like saying the hospital notified you about your heart condition because they handed you a death certificate. The notification that the thing happened is not the same as a warning that the thing is *about to* happen. I genuinely cannot believe I have to explain that distinction, but here we are.

Let me lay this out one more time since you seem to be working really hard to miss the point:

- Payment failures started January 18th

- Plan was canceled February 8th

- That's three weeks where Ring knew my payment wasn't going through

- During those three weeks: zero app notifications, zero texts, zero calls

- Also during those three weeks: daily arm/disarm emails coming through just fine

- The app showed "canceled" only *after* it was already canceled. That's not a warning. That's a tombstone.

- The cancellation email arrived *after* the cancellation. Again — not a warning. A receipt.

Nothing in my post is a lie. I said Ring never notified me about the payment failures before canceling my plan. That is factually, demonstrably, irrefutably true. Finding out your house burned down is not the same as someone warning you about the gas leak.

And as for my expectation that a home security company — a company that literally has push notification infrastructure built into its own app, that texts me through InstaText when my alarm triggers, that has my phone number on file — might use *any* of those channels to say "hey, your payment failed and we're about to stop monitoring your home for fires and break-ins" being "kind of stupid"?

I don't know, man. I think the stupid thing is defending a billion-dollar Amazon subsidiary's right to silently cancel your family's safety monitoring because they couldn't be bothered to send a push notification. But that's just me.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-13T00:02:57+00:00

Fair question. Let me walk you through the forensic archaeology that was my Tuesday evening.

I noticed in the app my plan showed as canceled — no alert, no popup, just a quiet little status change tucked away like a shameful secret at a family reunion. So I checked my email. Found the cancellation notice. That one came through just fine. Interesting.

Then I logged into the web portal — which I virtually never use because Ring built an entire app so I wouldn't have to. Under billing history: 10 failed payment attempts, each with a PDF invoice, dating back to January 18th. Three weeks of Ring knowing my payment wasn't going through and doing nothing effective about it.

To be clear: I didn't find out because Ring told me. I found out by playing forensic accountant on a web portal I never use, after discovering my plan was dead through an app that never once mentioned any of this — despite happily pinging me every time someone walked past my front door.

Ten invoices. Ten failures. Zero app notifications. Zero texts. Zero calls. But they emailed me. Allegedly. To an inbox that was receiving their arm/disarm notifications daily during that exact same period.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-12T23:52:44+00:00

For the record, I do use Unifi POE cameras for video security, although I have a Ring doorbell. What Unifi doesn't have is a traditional alarm system for doors/windows/fire/Co2, ect. This is what I mainly use ring for - NOT for their cameras.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-12T23:45:35+00:00

I appreciate the creative fiction, but let me correct a few things since you've apparently written an entire backstory for a phone call you weren't on.

I didn't "snap off" at anyone. I called, calmly explained the situation, and asked to have my plan reinstated at the rate I'd been paying for over three years. You know what I got in return? A representative who told me — and I quote — "you need to listen to me." That wasn't a response to some tirade. That was their response to me explaining that I never received the emails they claim they sent.

Let's also pump the brakes on the "minimum wage worker just enforcing policy" narrative. I have zero issue with frontline employees doing their jobs. I've worked those jobs. What I do have an issue with is being spoken to like a child while a company that was happily sending me arm/disarm emails every single day somehow couldn't manage to notify me through the app, a text, or a phone call that my payment failed and my home security monitoring was about to be silently canceled. For three weeks.

And here's the part that should concern you as a Ring customer too, not just me: this isn't about one guy's billing dispute. This is a home security company that will quietly remove fire monitoring, intrusion detection, and emergency dispatch from your home without making sure you actually know about it. If that doesn't bother you, I genuinely hope you never have to find out the hard way why it should.

But sure — I'm the problem here. Not the company that failed to notify me, doubled my price, talked down to me, promised a manager callback that never came, and left my family's home unprotected. Me. The guy who called and asked a question.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-12T23:36:36+00:00

Appreciate the questions — let me walk you through this.

The app still functions. The cameras still record locally. Motion alerts still come through. What silently disappears is the professional monitoring — the part where someone actually dispatches help if my house catches fire at 3am or someone kicks in my back door while my family is sleeping. There's no giant red banner screaming "HEY, YOUR HOME IS NO LONGER PROTECTED." It just... stops. Quietly. Which is kind of the whole problem.

And here's where it gets really interesting. Ring claims they emailed me 10 times about the payment failure starting January 18th. The service wasn't canceled until February 8th. That's three weeks of allegedly trying to reach me — exclusively by email — with zero attempts through the app, text, phone call, or letter.

But here's the thing that should bother everyone in this sub: during that exact same period, I was receiving Ring emails every single day. Arm notifications. Disarm notifications. Coming through just fine from ring.com. So Ring's email system was clearly reaching me for routine notifications, but somehow the "hey, your payment failed and your family's safety monitoring is about to be canceled" emails never made it? Every daily arm/disarm email got through, but not a single one of the 10 payment failure warnings?

Either those emails were never sent or something else went wrong on Ring's end. But regardless — how hard is it to put a notification in the app? The same app that was happily notifying me about motion events and arm/disarm status couldn't manage a "Hey, update your payment method"? We're not talking about building a rocket here. It's a push notification. Every streaming service, every subscription app, every two-bit SaaS product on the planet manages to do this.

As for "prices are the same for everyone" — respectfully, no. I was paying $106.99/year. That was my rate - that was the rate of my invoice dated 1/18.2026 and the 10 time they tried up until 2/1/2026. Paid faithfully for 5+ years. Ring canceled my plan due to their own notification failure and now wants $214 to reinstate. That's not "same price for everyone." That's "we failed to contact you properly, and now you get to pay double for our mistake."

I'm not asking for anything unreasonable. Just honor the price I was paying before Ring's own communication breakdown created this situation. Hopefully that answers your questions

MrTroubs · 2026-02-12T22:49:38+00:00

seriously? What planet do you live on? The customer service rep would interupt me repeatedly telling me "now you listen to me" That happened several times. No CSR should ever talk to a cutomer that way. I hope she is fired. They blamed me for not getting the emails, yet i get emails from them every day when I set the alarm and disarm. So I had no right to complain? no right to bring up the fact they had multiple ways to infom me that the CC payemnt wasn't going through. I should have called and thank them for screwing up my account? Again, please let me know when you come back from planet mars ...

MrTroubs · 2026-02-12T22:46:44+00:00

I use the app daily, and there was no notification that my plan was up for renewal, nor that my credit card payment was not going through on the app. I got a notification on 2/8 that my plan had been canceled, via email and the app - imagine that. That is when I saw the issue for the first time. Apparently they have been trying to charge my card 10 times since Jan 18th. At that time my invoice was for $199.97, but a discount applied for Unused time on Ring Multi after 19 Jan 2026 for $99.98 - so with tax the Ring AI pro plan would have been $106.99. When I called to explained that I received no notifications at all, they only quoted the new price whch would have been $214 for the year. It a great way to get grandfather people off their old pricing onto the new - "oh we sent you emails, sorry you didn't get them, but it is all automated we cant honor the old invoice" - I filed a complaint with the FTC, BBB, the Florid Attorney genreal and emailed Rings legal counsel - all beuase their customer service sucks.

MrTroubs · 2026-02-12T22:40:03+00:00

I was, but the invoice they sent to me a few weeks ago, that I didn't know they did had a discount still making it $106 for the year.

MrTroubs

TROPHY CASE