Chris from Stony Plain

This is going to be a lengthy one. Initial Sale: A salesman came to our door to sell us the system. We saw the orange placards up all over the neighbourhood, and figured, why not! A bunch of promises were made, including that when we moved, we could leave the old system behind, and they would come to our new house and install all new equipment at no charge and we would continue our contract. I believed this as they would potentially gain another client when someone took over our old system. The system: The system is nice, however very expensive. We paid an initial cost of $99, + $69/mth for a 7-year contract. I didn't mind the long contract because I never intend on getting rid of my home alarm. At the end of the day however, this is a lot of money going to Vivint for such shotty service. You can buy a complete home automation system now for $200-$400, and maybe $500 with a full alarm included. The move: Upon moving, we phoned Vivint to set up a time for someone to come do the install on our new house. They informed us we would be charged over $500 for a new panel and equipment, OR we would have to take the system out of our old house. Of course, the condition for sale on our old house was that we leave the alarm, so now we either break that condition, or pay Vivint a ton more money. My wife and I logged almost 9 hours total on the phone with Vivint being thrown around to different departments, and finally we ended up convincing our buyer that unless she wanted to take over our contract, we would have to take our old alarm panel. Vivint made us break conditions on our real estate agreement, and still in the end offered absolutely nothing. This was the worst customer service experience I've ever had with anybody! The new install: They send an installer over who is at our house for 7 hours installing the simple new system. This is due partly to him talking on the phone to his wife half the time, but also because even for those guys, they have to wait on the phone with Vivint forever. He then tried to 'sell' us additional equipment as we needed more sensors than our "10 point allotment" allowed. The total bill was almost $700 until we sat him down and had a talk. Magically he got a hold of his manager and most of that was waived. Conclusion: VIvint is not worth your time or money. If you're looking for a monitored system, look into another company for sure. If the alarm and home automation is what you're looking for, there's a ton of systems out there that do the same thing, if not better than Vivint.