Do Smart Locks Require a Subscription?

No.Not one of the five smart locks we cover needs a monthly plan to do its job. Locking, unlocking, issuing an entry code, revoking an entry code, seeing who came and went, answering Alexa or Google — all of it is included in the price of the hardware, for every brand on this site. Our product registry records all five locks as working fully without a subscription, and that is not a coincidence of the ones we picked: it is how this whole product category works.

That answer deserves to be stated flatly, because anyone arriving here from the camera aisle has learned to distrust it. On cameras the honest answer is “it depends, and the default is yes”. On locks it is simply no. Below is why the two halves of the same shelf behave so differently, what the paid things in the lock aisle actually are, and the two places a cost can still surprise you.

Why locks are the honest half of the smart-home aisle

The difference is what the device produces. A camera makes video. Video needs somewhere to live, and storing it costs the maker money every month for as long as you keep it — so a plan exists to cover that cost, and on a cloud-only camera there is no alternative to the plan because the camera has nowhere else to write. Ring is the clearest example of the pattern in the whole industry: its plans are what turn recording, sharing and saved history on.

A lock produces almost nothing. “Locked at 7:42pm by the keypad” is a few bytes. There is no storage bill, no bandwidth bill, no transcoding bill, so there is nothing recurring for a maker to pass on and nothing a plan could plausibly charge for. The functions people assume must be premium — unlimited guest codes, scheduled codes, an access log — are text, and text is free to move.

You can see makers behaving accordingly in their own marketing. Yale describes unlimited shared codes and Auto-Lock with DoorSense as properties of the Assure Lock 2. Schlage publishes up to 100 scheduled access codes on the Encode Plus. Wyze describes an activity log showing who locked or unlocked the door, when, and by which method. None of those is framed as a plan tier, because none of them costs anything to deliver.

So what are the paid things in the lock aisle?

There are three, and only one of them is a recurring charge in any household — and even that one is optional.

One: hardware that buys you remote access.This is the big one and it is a one-off, not a plan. A lock needs an internet path before a phone across town or a voice assistant can reach it. Schlage builds Wi-Fi into the Encode Plus with no additional accessories, and August builds it into the fourth-generation Wi-Fi Smart Lock. Yale takes the modular route: Bluetooth is included on every Assure Lock 2, while the Wi-Fi module upgrade is what enables remote access and the additional voice and smart-home integrations. Buy the wrong version and you have not been charged a subscription — you have simply bought a lock that stops at the end of your driveway.

Two: the cloud behind a hub, if you choose one.Some people reach their lock through a smart-home hub rather than the maker’s app, and a few hubs do charge. That is a hub cost rather than a lock cost, and it is covered in our hub privacy ranking and in best smart locks for Home Assistant, where going fully local removes it entirely.

Three: a professionally monitored alarm, which is a different product.If your lock is a component of a monitored security system then you are paying for the monitoring service — people in a room who call the police — not for the lock. That is a real monthly cost and a reasonable one; it is just not a lock subscription. Our DIY versus professional monitoring comparison is where that decision belongs.

What you get with no plan at all, lock by lock

The bottom row is the point of the page. Read up the column from there and you are looking at the entire feature set of a smart lock, all of it included. The only row with an asterisk is remote access on the Yale, and that asterisk is a hardware version rather than a bill.

The two costs that do catch people out

Batteries.This is the one genuine running cost of owning a smart lock, and it is small. Schlage publishes four AA cells with up to six months of typical use on the Encode Plus; Yale publishes four AA cells on the Assure Lock 2. Having Wi-Fi switched on is what shortens those figures, which is the honest trade for remote access — the published numbers and the behaviour behind them are in how long do smart lock batteries last?

The accessory you did not realise was separate. On the August the keypad is a distinct unit that mounts outside; the listing we link bundles the Keypad Touch, but not every August listing does, and without a keypad there are no entry codes and no Airbnb integration. On the Yale the Wi-Fi module is the equivalent trap. Neither is a subscription, but both are money you may not have budgeted, and both are worth checking in the cart rather than on the doorstep.

Three locks that do everything above with no plan

These are the three picks from our main lock ranking that cover the three different households — and the reason they are here is the table above, not a test we did not run.

The question worth asking instead

Since the fee question has a one-word answer, spend your attention on the ones that do not. Whether the lock still works when the batteries die is covered in do smart locks work without power? Whether it keeps your existing keys is in can you still use a key with a smart lock? Whether the thing is a good idea at all, given what it costs and what it replaces, is the honest version of this conversation and it lives in are smart locks worth it? And if the lock is going on a door you rent out, the Airbnb and rental ranking is where the per-stay code question gets answered properly.