Ring debuts an improved $99.99 entry-level doorbell with a $49 solar charger accessory, available June 3 and open for preorders now
Thomas Ricker / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Ring's entry-level doorbell has been a managed price point ever since Amazon cut the original Video Doorbell from roughly $150 to $100 as the acquisition closed in 2018. Since then the floor has kept dropping inside Amazon's own portfolio — Ring later shipped a $60 Video Doorbell Wired, its cheapest and smallest model, and sister brand Blink launched a $50 doorbell.
Today's refresh holds the $99.99 line rather than cutting it, pairing improved hardware with a $49 solar charger that opens an accessory upsell on the entry tier. The move reads as Ring defending its flagship entry price against its own cheaper siblings while adding attach revenue.
First-order effects
- Buyers can preorder the improved $99.99 doorbell now for a June 3 release, getting better hardware at the same price Amazon established for the category's entry tier in 2018.
- Ring gains a new $49 solar charger accessory that converts the entry-level purchase into a higher-ticket install without raising the headline price.
Second-order effects
- With Blink at $50 and Ring's own wired model at $60 below it, the $99.99 tier survives only if accessories like the solar charger carry the margin — expect more bundle-and-attach plays across Amazon's camera brands.
- Competing doorbell makers face a price ladder anchored by Amazon's own brands, pressuring them to match on either hardware price or bundled extras.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, smart-doorbell hardware keeps commoditizing toward the low $50s–$60s, leaving Ring's durable economics in subscriptions and monitoring — the services layer it built with Ring Alarm's $10/month professional monitoring.
- Amazon running both Ring and Blink as parallel price points points to portfolio-level pricing discipline, where brand tiers segment the market instead of competing head-to-head.
The trend: Amazon is compressing smart-doorbell hardware prices across Ring and Blink while shifting the profit center toward accessories and subscription services layered on top of cheap entry devices.