WARNING - NZ Nest Aware and Overseas Cameras

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HyperBlade

48 posts

Geek

#228803 23-Jan-2018 13:42

Just found this out, hopefully I can stop other people making the same mistake i did...

I purchased my camera 9 months ago when Nest were not in NZ and used a temp US credit card to pay for the subscription.

I figured now that they were in NZ I would change the subscription over to a NZ one which would allow me to have an NZ address.

However i've just been told by Nest support that you can't purchase Nest Aware for an overseas camera (say purchased in the USA) with a NZ credit card (note been advised Australian cameras are fine)

See Chatlog:

So if you want Nest Aware and the convince of paying with an NZ credit card, make sure you buy an NZ camera.

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20141 posts

Uber Geek

#1945409 23-Jan-2018 14:05

If you can still use the trial in NZ, then it can't really be something that is coded into the camera, so it looks to be a billing issue, and surely they can fix this from their end. I would ask to escalate it, as it sounds like you are talking to a bot , or someone low down who is just following flowcharts.

HyperBlade

48 posts

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#1945411 23-Jan-2018 14:12

mattwnz:

If you can still use the trial in NZ, then it can't really be something that is coded into the camera, so it looks to be a billing issue, and surely they can fix this from their end. I would ask to escalate it, as it sounds like you are talking to a bot , or someone low down who is just following flowcharts.

Yep spoke to someone higher and have been told it's a "server issue" I suspect a hang over from when they were blocking NZ credit cards.

I've asked them to escalate internally, but given it's take a month just to find out why I was getting a generic error message when trying to checkout I don't have much confidence in them doing anything as they don't seem to be too concerned about a customer not being able to pay.

Using their support system was an exercise in frustration, so hopefully I can stop someone else making the same mistake i did.

If they do fix it I will make sure I update this thread.

dacraka

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#1945827 24-Jan-2018 08:33

Ah that's annoying - but the positive thing about it is the Nest Aware subscription price is cheaper in USD compared to NZD ; )

Peppery

919 posts

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#1945850 24-Jan-2018 09:28

We found this out the hard way a while ago with an Amazon purchased Dropcam. Worked fine here in NZ with an NZ credit card until Nest took over, and then suddenly our NZ card wasn't good enough and the camera turned into a brick. As luck would have it, we were robbed during this and the camera would've got great footage if it was recording.

We now run everything locally.

tehgerbil

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#1945889 24-Jan-2018 10:12

Peppery:

We found this out the hard way a while ago with an Amazon purchased Dropcam. Worked fine here in NZ with an NZ credit card until Nest took over, and then suddenly our NZ card wasn't good enough and the camera turned into a brick. As luck would have it, we were robbed during this and the camera would've got great footage if it was recording.

We now run everything locally.

I physically cringed when I read that. I bet you were livid.

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#1945902 24-Jan-2018 10:37

Well damn.

We have had exactly the same issue of late - we had a DropCam for a long while and "fudged" the billing so that we could use it here.

When that stopped working last year, we were on the verge of moving on from Nest and then they finally released in NZ, so we stayed put and doubled down!

We have now bought 1 new Nest Cam and 1 Nest Aware unit FROM AMAZON US during the sale (cos the price here was outrageous) and had loads of issues renewing the subscription. After much back and forth with support, they advised it was a billing and account issue which would be resolved, gave us an extra few months free subscription for the inconvenience and advised us to create a complete new Nest Account in NZ in order to restore services once the free period ran out.

That is due in Feb and I am hoping that the device are not now bricks in NZ as they are US bought. If they are I will be exceptionally pee'd off as there is nothing clear to say you cannot use US devices under another countries account.

Behodar

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#1945994 24-Jan-2018 12:50

Peppery:

We found this out the hard way a while ago with an Amazon purchased Dropcam. Worked fine here in NZ with an NZ credit card until Nest took over, and then suddenly our NZ card wasn't good enough and the camera turned into a brick. As luck would have it, we were robbed during this and the camera would've got great footage if it was recording.

We now run everything locally.

Yeesh. This sort of thing is why I try to avoid cloud and subscription services whenever possible. In my experience the track record isn't great. I've had stuff disappear from my iTunes and iBooks "purchased" lists, although thankfully I have local backups of all of that. I've had a downloaded Xbox 360 game disappear, and it doesn't seem to be possible to make local backups of those. I've had a fairly expensive piece of Windows software fall over because the developer went out of business, when I didn't even know that it was talking to their server in the first place!

Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten and now I tend to compulsively strip DRM from things... or refuse to buy them if that's not possible.

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mattwnz

20141 posts

Uber Geek

#1946008 24-Jan-2018 13:16

Item:

Well damn.

We have had exactly the same issue of late - we had a DropCam for a long while and "fudged" the billing so that we could use it here.

When that stopped working last year, we were on the verge of moving on from Nest and then they finally released in NZ, so we stayed put and doubled down!

We have now bought 1 new Nest Cam and 1 Nest Aware unit FROM AMAZON US during the sale (cos the price here was outrageous) and had loads of issues renewing the subscription. After much back and forth with support, they advised it was a billing and account issue which would be resolved, gave us an extra few months free subscription for the inconvenience and advised us to create a complete new Nest Account in NZ in order to restore services once the free period ran out.

That is due in Feb and I am hoping that the device are not now bricks in NZ as they are US bought. If they are I will be exceptionally pee'd off as there is nothing clear to say you cannot use US devices under another countries account.

Also it is normal to move to different countries, so it is madness that they would expect you would have to buy new devices if you do. Imagine the outrage is Apple did this, and you had to buy new iphone or ipad if you move to a different country to use cloud service.

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#1946018 24-Jan-2018 13:38

mattwnz:

Also it is normal to move to different countries, so it is madness that they would expect you would have to buy new devices if you do. Imagine the outrage is Apple did this, and you had to buy new iphone or ipad if you move to a different country to use cloud service.

Well quite - if they are genuinely enforcing hardware geoblocking, I would expect a big push back.

Will be interesting to see what happens on the 14th when I redo my account.

HyperBlade

48 posts

Geek

#1949902 1-Feb-2018 10:09

Item:

Well damn.

We have had exactly the same issue of late - we had a DropCam for a long while and "fudged" the billing so that we could use it here.

When that stopped working last year, we were on the verge of moving on from Nest and then they finally released in NZ, so we stayed put and doubled down!

We have now bought 1 new Nest Cam and 1 Nest Aware unit FROM AMAZON US during the sale (cos the price here was outrageous) and had loads of issues renewing the subscription. After much back and forth with support, they advised it was a billing and account issue which would be resolved, gave us an extra few months free subscription for the inconvenience and advised us to create a complete new Nest Account in NZ in order to restore services once the free period ran out.

That is due in Feb and I am hoping that the device are not now bricks in NZ as they are US bought. If they are I will be exceptionally pee'd off as there is nothing clear to say you cannot use US devices under another countries account.

I think you are going to have the same problem i did... :(

Silly us for being early adopters and liking a product.

While the subscription may be cheaper in US dollars, by the time you add the temporary credit card fees it really isn't worth it.

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#1949951 1-Feb-2018 10:56

HyperBlade:
I think you are going to have the same problem i did... :(

Silly us for being early adopters and liking a product.

While the subscription may be cheaper in US dollars, by the time you add the temporary credit card fees it really isn't worth it.

So did you try creating a brand new New Zealand Nest account and site under a new email, removing the devices from your old one and then adding them fresh to your new account?

HyperBlade

48 posts

Geek

#1949965 1-Feb-2018 11:01

Item:
HyperBlade:

I think you are going to have the same problem i did... :(

Silly us for being early adopters and liking a product.

While the subscription may be cheaper in US dollars, by the time you add the temporary credit card fees it really isn't worth it.

So did you try creating a brand new New Zealand Nest account and site under a new email, removing the devices from your old one and then adding them fresh to your new account?

Yep, brand new nest account (NZ) with new email (as it takes 2 days to delete your existing Nest account). Removed devices on old one first, then added on new one and got same error when checking out.

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#1950107 1-Feb-2018 13:45

HyperBlade:

Yep, brand new nest account (NZ) with new email (as it takes 2 days to delete your existing Nest account). Removed devices on old one first, then added on new one and got same error when checking out.

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#1958516 15-Feb-2018 10:56

Update:

So my subscription ran out, I was unable to renew under a brand new account so I called support and went through it all again.

The long and the short of it was that they were unable to advise when or even if the inability to run an NZ subscription on a US bought camera would be resolved, but they will keep me updated.

In the meantime they have given me another extension on the free subscription for all 3 of my cameras up until November this year - which will equate to pretty much a free year of service on all 3 devices (over $300 worth) so I am not as annoyed as I might have been.

I guess I will let it run until November and then try again to renew - if the problem remains intractable, I will have 3 cameras I can't use properly, but they will be 1 year and 4 years old respectively and given the free service I have had, I may be a little less salty at then having to buy new cameras or move away from Nest entirely.

Obviously if they fix the issue then I will continue as a - relatively - happy Nest customer.

gabesmith

46 posts

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#1974186 13-Mar-2018 19:40

Hi just an update to say that I have been affected by this issue as well. I bought a Nest Outdoor Camera a while back while in the states. I used it with Nest Aware by fudging a US address but the timezone was not NZ. When Nest officially launched Nest products in NZ I decided to move my house and camera setting across to using my proper NZ address. I ran into this problem where I could not purchase a NZ Nest Aware subscription and got the run around from Nest support trying various things like removing the camera and re-adding to a different house. I even tried completely deleting my Nest account and starting from scratch which also did not work. They have been giving me extended free trials of the Nest Aware service.

After being pretty annoyed with the lack of progress and communication on the issue from Nest I decided to dig into the issue myself and cracked open Chrome dev tools to investigate what is going on....

I found there is an API call to POST /api/v1/nz/cart/placeorder?lang=en that fails with:

{"errors":[{"message":"Illegal argument","code":400}],"currentTime":"Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:53:11 +0000","requestUUid":"[xyz]"}

After digging some more I found this following snippet of java-script

https://store.nest.com/assets/nlroot-d1af86609027a8d4f5810f5a08890cea.js

_placeOrder: function(e, t, n) {
var r = Ember.get(this, "nest.language")
, o = Object.assign({
tosAgreed: !0,
timeZoneOffsetInMinutes: (new Date).getTimezoneOffset()
}, e)
return n ? Ember.get(this, "storeAPI").ajax("/payments/affirm/placeorder", {
type: "POST",
data: JSON.stringify(o),
headers: t,
contentType: "application/json"
}) : Ember.get(this, "storeAPI").ajax("cart/placeorder?lang=" + r, {
type: "POST",
data: o,
headers: t
})
}

I found that timeZoneOffsetInMinutes is being set to -780 which seems correct according to java-script but the API it gets passed to does not like. Purely taking a guess I tried setting it to 780 instead using the dev tools at a breakpoint and my Nest Aware subscription order went through!!

So I guess I have hacked how to become a paying customer of Nest Aware subscription. Please keep in mind you will need to know a bit about web development to repeat what I did. If people are interested I can put clearer instructions up but I wanted to share my discovery for now.

This begs the question, has anyone got a Nest Aware subscription working in NZ with a NZ purchased camera?

Hope this helps someone wanting to become a paying customer. I have let Nest know about this but based on the support folk I dont rate the chances of this being fixed in hurry but I am happy to be corrected....

Happy hacking.

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