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Service lifetime and your audio

Custom chimes and announcements are hosted by us, in the cloud. Any integrator worth their salt reads that sentence and immediately asks the right question:

What happens to my customer's doorbell when you turn it off?

Here is the honest answer, and it is the reason we built it this way.

Your chimes keep playing​

The processor stores the finished audio's address, not a licence to fetch it. Once you have uploaded a chime or created an announcement, the driver holds the link and plays it directly.

So if we shut the upload service down tomorrow — every custom chime and every announcement on every site carries on ringing. You would lose the ability to create new ones. Nothing that already works would stop working.

That is not a promise about our intentions. It is a property of how the driver is built, and we test it deliberately: we switch the service off, press the doorbell, and check it still rings.

You can take your audio with you​

Every uploaded chime has a Download button in the setup app. It is your file. Take it whenever you like, for any reason, without asking us.

You can host it yourself​

Any chime can point at your own https:// URL instead of ours. Host the MP3 wherever you like — your own web space, your customer's NAS, anywhere the speaker can reach.

That is the escape hatch, and note what it doesn't require: no driver update, no new licence, no call to us. Download your audio, put it somewhere, paste the link in. Done.

The honest caveats​

Nothing here is worth much if we hide the small print, so:

  • This is not unique to custom audio. The stock chime catalogue is cloud-hosted too — and unlike custom audio, it is fetched fresh from our service on every single press. If our service disappeared, the catalogue chimes would go quiet before your custom ones did. Custom audio is the more resilient of the two, not the less.
  • Sonos itself is a cloud service. The driver talks to Sonos's API to play anything at all. A processor with no internet cannot play a chime, ours or theirs. That has always been true of this product.
  • A chime you host yourself is yours to keep alive. If your URL stops responding, so does the chime.

In short​

If this goes awayYour custom chimes
The upload serviceKeep playing. You just cannot make new ones.
Our storage as wellRe-host them yourself — you already have the files.
Your internetNothing plays, ours or Sonos's.

We would rather tell you this plainly now than have you find it out later.