Did you, like me, buy a Ring Alarm system for your home because it offered the most affordable professional 24/7 monitoring around, at just $10 a month or $100 a year? Then I expect you — like me — just got an email stating you’ll now pay twice as much starting the next time you renew.

Here’s the top of the email I received a few hours ago, telling me I’ll pay $20 a month or $200 a year starting in March, which matches the price of the Ring Protect Pro plan that Amazon started selling three years ago. I was previously on Ring Protect Plus:

Price hikes are always annoying, but Ring is still a relatively affordable alarm service, I suppose. The truly infuriating part: Amazon is pretending it responsibly warned legacy customers that this was coming.

“This is your reminder that we previously notified you,” reads the first line of Ring’s email to me today. When? I certainly don’t remember ever getting an email telling me about a 100 percent price hike before...

But digging around on the company’s website, I do find a FAQ with an answer: “In September 2021, we sent you email letting you know that your Ring Protect Plus (1st Gen) subscription would be moving to a new plan starting in 2025.”

So, of course, I dig through my email from September 2021, where I find an email from Ring... which states nothing is changing except for the name of my plan.

Seriously, take a look at this portion of an email titled “Important: Your Plan Name Has Changed”:

Oh, but there’s that little footnote marker. See that number 1 at the very end of the sentence? That leads to a little dark grey section of fine print at the bottom of the email, which states:

In fact, looking back through my boring Ring renewal emails each year, every one of them has this fine print at the bottom. Basically, Amazon has been dark patterning its Ring customers for three years. If I hadn’t taken Amazon at its word that nothing was changing, maybe I would have switched to a different alarm system. I guess it’s not too late...

In fact, Ring may have dark patterned some of them again today. Some customers say their email about the price hike began with the words “New name. New features. Same great price,” before going on to describe how either the features or the price were about to significantly change.

After I published this story, Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger reached out to tell me that this last one was “a miss from our team,” and that the Canadian customers who received that email will get a free year of Ring Home Standard with Professional Monitoring as apology. Slightly more info here. Ring later clarified that it misspoke, though: instead of a full year of free service, it will offer free monitoring only, through January 1st, 2027.

I’m pissed because I’m over a barrel. Am I really going to rip and replace my hardwired Ring doorbell? Would I really let my home insurance alarm discount lapse? But I do understand the price hike to some degree. Inflation happens, and longtime Ring customers like me have been enjoying the low prices for many years.

While Ecobee has a similarly cheap subscription to the old Ring, Simplisafe’s price has been creeping up every year to north of $20 now, Arlo costs $25 a month, and ADT is $30.

Amazon’s Ring wouldn’t answer our direct questions about why it’s raising prices, or what percentage of Ring’s subscriber base was paying for monitoring, and did not address the other dark patterning. Yarger did point out that some customers will get up to a year of free monitoring, though, because Ring is raising the price on your first bill after March 1st.

Mine renews March 5th, unfortunately.

Update, October 3rd: Added more info from spokesperson.

Correction, October 4th: An earlier version of this story stated that some misled customers would get a free year of service. Instead, those Canadian customers will get free monitoring through January 1st, 2027.