A Lock and a Doorbell Are Not the Same Purchase: What Fails at the Front Door, and What You Fall Back On

August's Wi-Fi Smart Lock and eufy's S330 doorbell get compared as though you would pick one. You would buy both, or neither. The useful question is what each does when it stops working.

These two products are not alternatives. A retrofit lock turns the deadbolt you already own; a doorbell shows you who rang it. Nobody replaces one with the other, and scoring them against each other out of ten tells a buyer nothing. What they genuinely share is a location and a set of failure modes, so that is what this covers. Both are in an odd state as of 1 September 2026: August’s own site showed the lock at two different prices with an out-of-stock purchase widget, and the battery version of eufy’s S330 has quietly left eufy’s own doorbell page.

Prices and stock on 1 September 2026

• August Wi-Fi Smart Lock: $199.99 on its product page with an out-of-stock purchase widget, and $229.99 on August’s homepage the same day
• August’s homepage also listed the lock with Keypad Touch at $249.99, and the Yale Keypad Touch alone at $119.99
• August claims up to three months from two CR123 batteries; DoorSense is included, a keypad is not
• eufy lists only the wired Video Doorbell S330, at $109.99 with $70 off; the battery Dual is no longer on eufy’s doorbell page
• The dual-camera E340 that succeeds it costs $119.99, ten dollars more than the S330 it replaces

What a flat battery leaves you holding

Android Police’s review puts the lock’s two CR123 cells at roughly three months, and notes that the 2.4GHz-only radio drains them faster at the edge of Wi-Fi range, which is exactly where a front door sits relative to a router in the middle of a house. The unit is bulky at 2.8 by 1.8 inches, and there is no keypad and no fingerprint reader in the box.

That combination defines the failure mode. When the cells die or the Wi-Fi drops, there is no code to punch and no finger to present. What remains is the physical key, which is precisely the thing many buyers expected a smart lock to let them stop carrying. Android Police calls the lock a reasonable purchase at about $150 and advises against paying the $200-plus list price, which is what August is asking.

A keypad is available, at a price that changes the arithmetic. August’s homepage listed the Yale Keypad Touch at $119.99 and the lock bundled with it at $249.99. Treat the keypad as part of the purchase rather than an accessory, because without it the lock has no offline entry method of its own.

The door itself is a component

A retrofit lock does not replace your hardware; it turns the deadbolt already fitted. Every mechanical problem in that deadbolt becomes a smart-home problem. Android Police’s reviewer found that a warped door defeated auto-lock completely, and no firmware update addresses a door.

DoorSense, included in the box, reports whether the door is open or closed. It does not report whether the frame has swollen, whether the strike plate is misaligned or whether the bolt is binding. Before ordering, throw the bolt by hand a dozen times and watch for resistance. If a person has to lean on the door to lock it, a small motor will not manage unaided, and that is a carpentry job rather than a returns question.

Which S330 you can still buy from eufy

The naming has been loose for years: the same hardware was sold as the eufy Video Doorbell Dual and as the eufy Security Video Doorbell S330, and eufy’s store now uses only ‘Video Doorbell (Wired) S330’. On 1 September 2026 that wired unit at $109.99, marked $70 off, was the only S330 on eufy’s collection page. The battery model with HomeBase appears at third-party retailers but not at the manufacturer, which is as close to an end-of-life signal as eufy has given.

The rest of the current range frames the choice: the dual-camera E340 at $119.99, the same model with a USB-C battery pack at $139.99, the C31 with battery pack at $109.99, the C31 at $84.99 and the C30 at $59.99. The successor costs more than the survivor, which is unusual and worth knowing before assuming the older model is the budget pick.

The storage claim is why people buy eufy, so its history matters

eufy’s entire pitch at the front door is that footage stays with you and no monthly fee is charged. That claim has a regulatory record attached to it. On 4 February 2025 the New York Attorney General secured a $450,000 settlement with the distributors of eufy products, Fantasia Trading, Power Mobile Life and Smart Innovation.

The findings are specific. Video data was not protected by end-to-end encryption, leaving portions of the transmission unencrypted; live video feeds could be reached without any authentication by anyone holding the correct URL; some of those URLs were derivable without the user’s authorisation; and security testing had been insufficient to catch the flaws. The settlement requires a comprehensive information-security programme, a secure development lifecycle with third-party testing, vulnerability management with regular penetration testing, and stronger encryption for video both in storage and in transit. That is the correct remedy, and it is also an admission that the headline selling point was not true when people bought on it.

Anker paid owners to act out the crimes its AI learns from

In October 2025 it emerged that eufy had been running a campaign paying camera owners two dollars per video clip, submitted through a Google Form, to film staged suspicious behaviour: testing locked car doors, walking away with a delivery box, simulated package theft. eufy’s stated target was more than 40,000 clips of staged and real incidents to train detection models, and more than 120 users took part. The campaign ran quietly for several months before it was reported.

Two things are true at once here. Owners were told the footage was for AI training and nothing else, and Android Police notes that eufy did not scrape footage without permission or bury the purpose in fine print, which distinguishes it from worse behaviour elsewhere in the category. But the reason it matters to a doorbell buyer is that a company whose local-storage claim failed a regulator’s inspection was simultaneously building a pipeline of customer-supplied video into its models. Both facts belong in the same decision.

The fallback kit

1. Keep a physical key somewhere reachable without the app. With no keypad in the box it is the only backup the lock ships with.
2. Price the Keypad Touch at $119.99 into the purchase if you want code entry, rather than treating it as something to add later.
3. If doorbell wiring exists, take the wired S330 at $109.99 and skip battery models entirely, since a wired unit never leaves the wall to charge.
4. Assume the video claim you are buying on is the claim to verify. Read what the vendor says the free tier stores, not what the marketing says about monthly fees.
5. Compare August’s homepage against its product page before ordering. On 1 September 2026 the two disagreed on both price and availability.

Sources: August · Android Police · eufy · Hunton Andrews Kurth · Android Police