Wyze’s New Bulb Is the Fastest, Cheapest Way to Modernize Your Home’s Lighting

So, you want to get in on the smarthome craze, but aren’t crazy about the initial cost? Wyze’s new Bulb can help you out.

While it’s not the first all-in-one smart bulb on the market, it’s the cheapest from a reliable supplier. It also works with popular platforms, like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, right out of the box. At $8 a bulb, with no need for a Hue-style hub (which is barely more than a conventional “dumb” LED light bulb), it’s an excellent choice for those who are just getting started or those who want to expand basic connected lighting to their entire home on the cheap.

There’s not much to the packaging: they sent me a four-pack of the new bulbs in a box that doesn’t look much different from something you’d pull off a hardware store shelf. It helpfully informs you that the bulbs inside work with Amazon, Google, and IFTTT, and they’re rated for 800 lumens of brightness.

What it doesn’t tell you (and what you might not assume) is that the bulbs are white only, offering a color temperature of 2700-6700 K. That covers a broad spectrum of “warm” to “cool” in conventional bulb terms, but Wyze’s budget bulbs won’t give you the rainbow colors you might associate with smarthome lighting.

That’s pretty much the only downside to this bulb, though, and it’s not much of a problem. If you want a cheap way to check out smarthome functionality, this works. And if you want to expand smart lighting to your entire home—with the small caveat that you can’t do it in Technicolor—it works there, too.

Wyze’s app is surprisingly adept at handling its myriad products, and the Bulb is no exception. You can add shortcuts, set them to different rooms (or “groups” in the Wyze app), change scenes for waking up or sleeping, and schedule events in an interface better than the major omnibus options (no surprise there). Link it to Amazon or Google instead, and it works exactly as you’d expect. For an inexpensive and simple gadget, you can’t hope for much more.

The bulb, at five ounces, is heavier than even the hub-free bulbs I’ve tried from other budget manufacturers. But unless you plan to use it in lamps that are oddly fragile or rely on tension to stay in place (like a Pixar-style desk lamp), this won’t be an issue for most people.

As a value proposition, next to products like Hue (which cost $15-$20 for a white-only bulb, not including the mandatory wireless hub or more expensive Bluetooth versions), the Wyze Bulb is phenomenal. It’s even cheaper than some of the no-name bulbs out there, and it doesn’t give you headaches from its branded app or when connecting to Google or Amazon.

Fill your smarthome up with these bulbs, and your bank account will thank you.