What is it worth to switch off the bedroom lamp without getting up, or to have the coffee maker start before the alarm goes off? Amazon has lowered its own answer a few days before Prime Big Deal Days: the Amazon Smart Plug goes from $24.99 to $12.98, 48% off, and the price is not reserved for Prime members. It is Amazon’s in-house plug, made to work with Alexa and sold here as a single unit.
Voice Control for Anything With an On/Off Switch
The plug sits between the wall outlet and whatever you connect to it, and all it does is cut or restore power on command. That is why Amazon specifies appliances with a physical on/off switch: a lamp, a fan or a basic coffee maker left in the “on” position will start as soon as the plug lets current through, while a device that needs a button pressed after each power-up will not. Commands come from the Alexa app on a phone or from a compatible Alexa device, with the kind of sentence Amazon uses as its example, “Alexa, turn on the fan.”
Setup needs no smart home hub. You plug it in, open the Alexa app and follow the steps, which Amazon says takes a few minutes. The casing is compact enough to leave the second socket of a standard outlet free, so two of these plugs fit one above the other, and that detail matters more than it sounds if the outlet behind the TV stand is the only one in reach.
Schedules are where the plug earns its place. It can act as a timer for a light, or run a lighting schedule while you are away so the house does not sit dark for a week, and it can be part of an Alexa routine that turns on a lamp and starts the coffee together in the morning. With Alexa+, Amazon says those routines can be created by voice in plain language, by telling Alexa what you want the plug to do. I’ll admit the vacation lighting is the use I find most convincing, more than asking a speaker to switch on a fan that is two steps away.
The limits are easy to state. Amazon’s listing mentions Alexa and no other assistant, so I would not buy this plug for a home built around Google Home or Apple Home. Voice control also requires an Alexa device such as an Echo speaker, which is sold separately, although the app alone is enough for schedules and remote control from a phone. The listing says nothing about energy monitoring either. On reliability, Amazon states that the plug reconnects to Alexa by itself after a power cut or a Wi-Fi outage, which spares you from setting it up again every time the router restarts.
Buying two changes the math slightly: the single Amazon Smart Plug is $12.98 instead of $24.99 on Amazon, and the 2-pack is $23.98 instead of $49.98, or $11.99 per plug. Amazon labels the single plug a limited time deal, with free returns and no Prime membership required.