ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium Review: Full Protection Now Costs 20 Dollars a Month, Not 10

The thermostat is good and needs no subscription to heat a house. But ecobee moved 24/7 monitoring out of its top plan, and grandfathered subscriptions end on 31 December 2026.

ecobee sells the Smart Thermostat Premium for 229.99 dollars on its own store, marked down from a list price of 259.99, in stock with free shipping in three to seven business days as of 1 September 2026. The thermostat by itself asks for no money after that: heating, cooling and scheduling all work without a card on file. What changed is everything built around it. ecobee took 24/7 professional monitoring out of the 10 dollar plan people had already bought sensors and cameras to use, turned it into a 10 dollar add-on, and put a date on how long existing subscribers keep their old terms.

A list price that rose while the sale price fell

The Premium launched on 17 May 2022 at 249.99 dollars, announced alongside the Smart Thermostat Enhanced at 189.99. Four years on, ecobee’s own store shows a list price of 259.99, ten dollars above launch, discounted to 229.99. So the number ecobee compares its discount against has gone up, while the number you actually pay has come down. Both facts are true and only one of them appears in the marketing.

The range has also grown downward rather than upward. The Smart Thermostat Essential was announced at CES 2025 and launched in March 2025 at 129.99 dollars, replacing the ecobee3 Lite at 150. The Premium remains the flagship and is still listed on ecobee’s current all-products page, so nothing here suggests it is on the way out.

What 229.99 dollars gets you without paying again

The Premium’s integration list is unusually long for a thermostat. ecobee’s product page names Apple Home and HomeKit, Alexa Built-In for on-device voice, Google Assistant, Samsung SmartThings, IFTTT and ecobee-by-Generac integrations. Siri is built in, which requires iOS or iPadOS 15 or later plus a HomePod or HomePod mini running software version 15 or later. For a device that mostly needs to talk to a boiler, that is a lot of ways in.

The free security tier, which ecobee calls Core, is more capable than most free tiers and has one hole in it. Core covers motion and person detection, door and window open-close alerts, two-way talk, live view on the Premium itself, and a manual siren. It stores zero video history. Nothing is recorded, so nothing can be reviewed. Every clip you might want to look at afterwards sits behind a paid plan, which is the mechanism by which a thermostat that needs no subscription becomes a system that does.

One requirement is easy to miss. The Alexa Built-In voice assistant runs on the thermostat itself, which is genuinely useful in a hallway, but the equivalent Siri support depends on you already owning a HomePod or HomePod mini. Buyers assuming the thermostat brings Siri to a house with no Apple speaker in it will be disappointed.

Monitoring moved out of the plan it was sold in

Tom’s Guide reported the restructure plainly: professional monitoring was removed from ecobee’s top-tier plan and turned into a paid add-on at 10 dollars a month, which takes full protection from 10 dollars a month to 20. Smoke monitoring became a separate 5 dollar add-on on the same basis.

The current ladder on ecobee’s plans page runs Core at nothing, Plus at 5 dollars a month or 50 a year, and Advanced at 10 dollars a month or 100 a year. Plus buys package detection and 30 days of event history for a single camera, smoke-alarm listening and enhanced energy savings. Advanced buys the same across unlimited cameras. On top of either sit the add-ons: Smoke Alarm Detection at 5 dollars a month or 50 a year, Total Protection at 10 dollars a month or 100 a year. There is a one-month free trial when an eligible device is set up.

Read that ladder as a buyer rather than a subscriber and the problem is obvious. Somebody who bought a Premium and a camera on the understanding that 10 dollars a month was the ceiling now finds the ceiling is 20.

31 December 2026 is the date on your old plan

Existing customers were not repriced immediately. According to Tom’s Guide, they keep their current plans until 31 December 2026 and must then move onto the new tiers. That gives anyone already subscribed four months from today before the arithmetic changes, and it gives anyone considering the hardware a clear number to budget against rather than the one currently advertised.

It is worth stating what this is not. The thermostat does not stop working, the schedule does not lapse, and nobody loses heating. This is a security subscription, and if the only ecobee product in your house is the thermostat, none of it touches you. The people affected are precisely those who bought most deeply into the ecosystem.

Four years of flagship status without Matter or Thread

Neither Matter nor Thread appears on the Premium’s product page, and neither appears in the 2022 launch announcement. This is not an oversight of documentation. When ecobee launched the Essential in 2025, Notebookcheck reported that it explicitly does not support Matter or Thread, and described the pattern as ecobee’s reluctance to add support for the Matter smart home standard rather than a technical limitation.

Practically, that means your Premium reaches other devices through ecobee’s own integration list and no further. If Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home and SmartThings cover your house, nothing is missing. If you are assembling a system around Matter so that no single vendor’s cloud can strand you, this is the wrong thermostat, and it has been the wrong thermostat for four years.

There is one practical test for whether this matters to you. Write down every smart device you expect to buy in the next five years. If any of them is a brand you have never heard of, Matter is how it will talk to the rest of your house, and this thermostat will not be part of that conversation.

What ecobee did to owners of its first thermostat

There is a precedent for how this company handles the end of a product’s life. On 31 July 2024 ecobee switched off the cloud features of its original 2007 Smart Thermostat and the EMS, having announced the change on 3 May 2024, three months ahead. HVAC control and scheduling survived. Weather, smart-home integrations and anything that depended on a server did not. Owners were offered a 30 percent discount code toward a replacement.

Set alongside that, the corporate context matters: ecobee has been a subsidiary of Generac Holdings since the 770 million dollar acquisition announced on 1 November 2021, which is why ecobee-by-Generac integrations now appear on the product page.

The honest shape of this review is therefore split. If you want a thermostat with genuinely good voice and platform support, room sensors and no recurring cost, 229.99 dollars is a fair price and you can ignore every subscription paragraph above. If you were buying into ecobee Smart Security as a monitored alarm system, price it at 20 dollars a month from January, not 10, and decide again at that number.

Sources: ecobee · Tom’s Guide · ecobee · Notebookcheck · T3