So, I am getting older, have a new house, and a growing family.  I live in a nice neighborhood, but worry about leaving the house obviously unoccupied for 8 hours/day.  Big dog is not an option. Self-monitoring does me no good, since I can't race home.  I am friends with the neighbors, but they work too.  If someone cases my street for 5 minutes over 3 days, they'd know I am a soft target.

Option 1: Simplisafe2 is on sale today on Woot! for $204.  $14.99/month live monitoring

Option 2:  Honeywell Lynx 7000 kit for $470 or so off of Amazon.  Pay Alarmrelay.com $8.99/month to monitor it.

Option 3; Buy a shiny new ADT yard sign. Cross fingers.

The Honeywell's elevated cost pays itself off in 44 months over the simplisafe due to the lower monitoring costs.  Honeywell can be integrated with zwave. I don't know if I want to integrate home automation into my alarm or not.

Any opinions of simplisafe, monitored alarms, alarmrelay.com as a monitoring service, and how home automation ties into all of this is appreciated.  

Bottom line if you choose Simplisafe and are not happy you have to buy new equipment to go to another central station. They never advertise that they use proprietary communications format that only their central station can receive. So yeah, no contract no big deal for them you are a captive user.

You might want to check out http://oomihome.com/. I had a contract with Castle Rock security before and I will never have another contracted security system again!

You really don't have to have a long term contract anymore unless you are leasing the equipment. If someone comes to me and wants to have a month to moth cancel at any time I'm good with it. However I will charge you to come program it. A longer term and the programming is on me.



 

oomi is interesting concept but too many unanswered questions and no way to ask them.

They are a start up and don't even have a product yet.  They are still in cloud funding stage.

No specs are offered.  

No phone # or email.  

A few 'packages' are offered but no explanation/pricing if you need additional door, window or motion detectors.  

Website says first shipments are scheduled to begin in Oct and payment is now?  

Thanks, but I think not.