Hive has launched a new starter kit to encourage more people to get set up with smart home gear.
Called the Warm Welcome Home Plan, it provides you with Hive Active Heating, two Hive Active Lights, an Active Plug, Hive Motion Sensor as well as an Amazon Echo Dot for voice control with Alexa.
Alexa enables you to switch on the lights and control the temperature in your house or you can link them to a Hive Sensor in the Hive app and your lights and heat will come on as you walk past.
The package costs £27.99 per month for a year if you plump for Hive Active Heating installation by a British Gas engineer. Thereafter it’s a mere £2.99 per month for the Hive Live subscription service which gives you an ongoing warranty and advanced features including Mimic Mode, which helps make it look like you’re at home when you’re not.
Effectively it’s a 0% interest plan on the devices as after 12 months you will have paid for them – each of Hive’s plans now work this way, so you can pay £19.99 a month for a year if you just want Hive Active Heating, for example.
It’s good that Hive has now introduced a set term for the higher fee on its subscription plans. When it first moved into subscriptions you could be paying the same monthly fee even once you’d paid off the cost of the devices.
We felt that was confusing to customers and the newer plans certainly remedy this.
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