Service Packages

No. That's the point of the design.

The system is built so the person living with it doesn't operate it — you do. Your mother's daily experience is a keypad by the door she can use like a light switch, and a button she wears if she wants one. She doesn't need a smartphone, she doesn't need to open an app, and she doesn't need to remember a password. Everything else — the alerts, the cameras, the wellness summary — runs in the background and comes to your phone.

We spend the last part of every installation sitting down with your parent and walking through the two or three things they'll actually touch, and we leave a printed one-page card by the phone. If they still have questions next month, they call us, not you.

It's a fair question, and it's the one we take most seriously.

Nothing gets installed that your parent hasn't agreed to. During the free assessment we sit down with them, not just you, and go room by room. Cameras go in shared spaces — entryways, kitchen, living room. They do not go in bedrooms or bathrooms, ever, no matter who asks.

The wellness monitoring doesn't watch them, it watches the house: a motion sensor knows the kitchen was used this morning, not what was cooked. What you get is a signal that the day started normally — not a feed of your mother's life.

In practice, most of the pushback we hear from parents isn't about privacy. It's about the fear that this is step one toward being moved out of their home. The honest answer is that it's the opposite: the system exists so the conversation about moving can happen years later than it otherwise would.

The system keeps working. Vermont winters made sure we designed for that.

The security panel has a cellular connection and a battery. If the power drops, it stays online. If the internet drops, it fails over to cellular and monitoring never stops — 24/7 dispatch, smoke and CO alarms, and emergency buttons all still function.

What pauses during an internet outage is camera streaming and the wellness dashboard, because those need bandwidth. They come back on their own when service is restored.

And on the Hearth and Beacon plans, we're watching the home's network ourselves. If the internet at your mother's house goes down at 2 a.m., we know — and we're usually working on it before anyone in your family notices.

You have three days to cancel after signing, no questions asked and no cost — that's your right under Vermont law for any agreement signed in your home, and we'll hand you the form ourselves.

After that, Ember runs month-to-month. Cancel with 30 days' notice, any time, for any reason.

Hearth and Beacon are 36-month monitoring agreements. That term is what lets us install a full system for a fraction of what the equipment is worth and stand behind it for three years. If you need to end the agreement early, you're responsible for the remaining monthly balance.

There are two exceptions we don't charge for, and they're the two that actually happen:

• Your parent moves into a care facility. Send us documentation and we release you from the agreement. We're not going to bill you for monitoring an empty house.
• Your parent passes away. The agreement ends. We'll come get the equipment when your family is ready, and not before.

We put those in writing because the whole point of this business is what happens to your parent — and charging a grieving family a termination fee is not a business we want to be in.

The equipment is yours; you paid for it at installation. If you cancel, it stays in the house. What ends is the monitoring service.

Upgrade whenever you want, and most families eventually do.

The system is designed to grow. Adding a wellness sensor package or another camera doesn't mean tearing anything out — the panel and the network we install on day one support all three plans. When you move up, you pay for the new equipment and the monthly rate changes on your next billing cycle. If you prepaid the year, we credit what you've already paid toward the new plan rather than making you eat it.

There's no charge to upgrade. There's no new contract term, either — you stay on the agreement you already signed.

Downgrading is different. You can move down at the end of your term, or any time after it. During the initial 36 months, we'll work with you if your situation genuinely changes, but the monthly rate is what makes the installation pricing possible, so we can't drop it on request in month four.

The practical advice: don't buy a plan for the parent you might have in three years. Buy for the parent you have now. Moving up is easy, and needs almost always move in one direction.