OpenALPR - No more free rides

[spankdog]

I would never pay the $40-50 a month or more just to "play" with this at my house but I am going to sign up for the $5/month home plan now. Happy to gain a few features

 

[Robert G.]

I'm fairly bummed out this change, since I just got into ALPR. You are losing the make/model/color (not sure about direction of travel) with this change.

What concerns me more than it now costing $5.00 is the price will certainly increase. If you have 2 cameras you are looking at $120 a year right now. I bet within 12 months there will be a price increase up from the $5.00 introduction price.

The open source code (a few years old) is sitting there on Github, hopefully someone with some skills will pick up the project and log some hours on it.

 

[d.lux]

And here we go -

Dear OpenALPR User:
Please note that effective January 30, 2020, we will no longer be offering a Free Tier of our Watchman software (formerly Cloud Stream). While the Free Tier is going away, we are excited to offer our new Watchman Home plan at only $5 per month. It offers some fantastic benefits that were previously not available with the free plan:

1. Receive alerts on up to 5 license plates via text message, email, or through the OpenALPR Dashboard.
2. 5-day data retention (increased from 2-day data retention).
3. Dashboard access for up to 3 users (increased from 2 users).

Additionally, as a gesture of goodwill for test driving the OpenALPR platform, we have applied an extra 30-day free trial of our Watchman Commercial plan to your account. This promotional credit has already been applied and you will see your time remaining when logging into the dashboard.

We realize that this adjustment may cause difficulties for some users; but, we think you will love Watchman Home, the new design of OpenALPR.com, and the other great updates soon to come. If you have any additional questions about our available Watchman plans, please email us at info@openalpr.com. Thank you for your understanding.

 

[Arjun]

They should just recode the open source version as an API for Blue Iris

 

[wtimothyholman]

The $5 / month plan is worth it just for the alert feature. Getting real time alerts is a major advantage that the old free plan never provided. For most home and small business users, monitoring 5 plates may be more than sufficient.

As to whether OpenALPR will try to increase the price over time, keep in mind that they will have competition coming from Dahua (e.g. the Ultra-AI series) if they do so. Built-in ALPR in a lower cost camera with 12X zoom is only a matter of time. I expect that they will not want to price themselves out of the market.

 

[highsecurity]

I was wondering why I was getting notifications coming through via text that I had set up when I started.

I agree. I was happy to see this. I didn't notice that it got the car make and model right anyway. But this price is right about the most I'd pay for the convenience.

I'm happy to hear there is some competition too.

I got tired of checking it every day. But wasn't willing to pay the high cost for automation. Slowly I let it go.

Now I'm interested again and they have a new customer.

 

[DLONG2]

I think one reason they are holding back on the color/make/model data is that it was often inaccurate, and they figured that 5 days of data retention might show a specific car 10 times in that time frame, and get tagged with 4 different colors and 8 different makes and models.

Curious if anyone has signed up for the Watchman Home service yet, who could share with us the new column headers. I'm curious to see how it might impact the LPR Downloader.

 

[spankdog]

I'm going to sign up as soon as my commercial trial expires. 20 more days. And I agree the make model info is mostly incorrect so I'm not going to miss it.

 

[StratRider]

so is it OpenALPR or nothing?
a quick google shows about others that are free but I am assuming these have been tried and failed. Correct ?

 

[gpower07]

Also another thought is how about getting a camera designed for LPR how much it will be which is say same as

• 

IPC-HFW5231E-Z12E
But just has the lpr function built into it.. Since it seems like if we do 5x12 that is also $60 a year for open alpr a year for now hopefully that price would not go up in future anytime soon anyhow, so say if the lpr camera are only $100-200 more might even be an option for some people to consider that and have the built in LPR function into the camera. But again I do NOT know any pricing I hope other or Andy can chime in and see if we even have a camera which has LPR function built into it and has about 12x motorized zoom function and if yes at what price point. Thanks !

for hikvision 8-32mm lpr camera is 599$ in California. OR LTS

 

[wtimothyholman]

so is it OpenALPR or nothing?
a quick google shows about others that are free but I am assuming these have been tried and failed. Correct ?

There are several other companies specializing in LPR software, but they are either strictly focused on government / corporate customers, or they just don't work as well. Mt. Juliet, a town just to the east of me, is currently installing a city-wide LPR system. They chose Rekor (i.e. OpenALPR) after an open bid period when they invited different vendors to demonstrate the capabilities of their software. One of the Mt. Juliet officers did an interview afterwards where he basically said that Rekor was head and shoulders above the competition, both in accuracy and responsiveness (i.e. how quickly alerts were received by officers when a test plate was scanned), and that it was pretty much of a no-brainer to award the contract to them.

Rekor has also continued to develop and update their software, plus they are a US-based company (very important to a lot of customers). In my experience, their updates to the OpenALPR agent have significantly improved its performance over the past 18 months. I personally consider $5 / month / camera to be well spent for long-term support of home ALPR.

The wild card is that companies like Dahua and Hikvision are now bringing AI cameras to market with ALPR built in. It isn't clear to me if those systems provide email or text alerts, plus Chinese companies don't have much reputation for timely software support, but the trend is certainly there. In time we're probably going to see $200 to $300 dollar cameras from Ring, Nest, Wyze, etc., that will record license plates.

 

[spankdog]

Anyone seen a Jeep motorcycle before? LOL It was actually a UPS truck.

 

[wtimothyholman]

Anyone seen a Jeep motorcycle before? LOL It was actually a UPS truck.
View attachment 55440

Which is why I've never cared much about the vehicle ID feature in OpenALPR. At night it is useless, and in the daytime it is easily confused by other vehicles or objects in the image. I don't consider it a big loss for the $5 / month level.

 

[nbstl68]

Drug dealers operate this same way...the candy is free...until you are hooked and really need it.

 

[StratRider]

Which is why I've never cared much about the vehicle ID feature in OpenALPR. At night it is useless, and in the daytime it is easily confused by other vehicles or objects in the image. I don't consider it a big loss for the $5 / month level.

Just making sure I read this right - - - for $5/mo I can still get just the list of plates without any other info?
And I can get that in a .csv file too ?

 

[spankdog]

Just making sure I read this right - - - for $5/mo I can still get just the list of plates without any other info?
And I can get that in a .csv file too ?

 

[Cranzy]

Will attempt to setup my own server with the OpenALPR code from github.

 

[d.lux]

Signed up for the $5 a month plan being the valuation of the item (to me) is worth it...

I tracked roughly 15k plates last week on my street and helped the neighbor with a van break in with my home cams + lpr

He was more than happy to see the data I have.

Will ride it out until LPR tracking is offered via Dahua cams...

Edit - no settings changed for me via tools provided from the forums users...

 

[DLONG2]

I signed up for the Watchman Plan this evening. The already-installed agent kept on collecting and uploading data without any interruption, and a refresh of the OpenALPR dashboard stopped showing the nag message about choosing a plan. As azicemachine pointed out earlier in another thread, the make, model, body and color all return 0.0 in their respective fields. But the csv file's structure has not changed.

 

[tech101]

Signed up for watchman plan as well this evening I want to know more about this Export CSV report wanna make this work Any guide on how to start ? or where to start ?