The Shelly app: what's free, and what Premium adds

What the free plan does

The app is called Shelly Smart Control, and the plan you get by default is called Basic. It isn't a trial or a teaser. Every Shelly device you own is fully controllable on it: on and off, dimming, schedules, scenes, rooms, firmware updates and notifications.

Schedules are worth calling out, because people assume they are a paid feature. They aren't. You can schedule any device by clock time, or by sunrise and sunset with an offset of however many hours and minutes you want, on whichever days you choose, without paying anything.

The free plan also gives you five dashboards with up to 40 widgets on each, three Alexa virtual actions, five events per device in the activity log, and charts drawn at hourly intervals.

What Premium adds

Two of those rows behave in a way the list doesn't show.

The extra dashboards and widgets are a one-time bonus rather than a rental. Subscribe, build them, cancel later, and you keep them.

The forgotten-lights reminder isn't a timer. It watches consumption on any device you have set to the Lighting appliance type, spends about a week learning what normal looks like, then notifies you when a light is on that usually wouldn't be.

Who Premium actually suits

Three kinds of household get real value from it.

If you own energy-monitoring gear, the chart resolution alone can justify it. At hourly intervals a pool pump, a hot water system or an air conditioner is one flat bar. At one-minute intervals you can see the compressor cycling, count the starts, and work out what a habit actually costs.

If you run Alexa, three virtual actions goes nowhere and 100 is more than most homes will use. That limit alone decides it for some people.

If you want automations that react to the weather, Premium is the only way to get them. Premium scenes can trigger on the forecast for the next one to six hours: cloud cover, wind direction and force, chance of precipitation, temperature, humidity. Close the blinds on the west side when the afternoon is forecast to hit 35, and that is a Premium scene.

If none of those describe you, the free plan is genuinely enough, and we would rather say so than sell you a subscription you will cancel.

What it costs, and how the trial works

Premium is €3.99 a month, or €35.99 a year, VAT included, billed through PayPal. Shelly publishes those figures in euro and we have not seen local currency pricing, so what lands on your statement depends on the rate the day you are billed. The yearly plan works out around a quarter cheaper than paying monthly.

First-time subscribers get three months free on either plan. It is genuinely free and you can cancel inside it, with one condition worth knowing before you start: cancel the trial and you cannot apply for it again. Start it once you have your devices installed and some data worth looking at, not on the day they arrive.

What Premium doesn't change

It doesn't touch local control. Each device stores its own schedules and runs them from its own clock, so they keep firing with the internet down on either plan. Changing a schedule from the app needs a connection; running one doesn't. The switch on your wall is unaffected either way, and the web interface built into each device is free.

It doesn't affect Matter or Home Assistant either. Home Assistant talks to Shelly devices locally and never goes near the Shelly cloud, so Premium adds nothing at all to a Home Assistant setup.

One announced feature is worth checking rather than assuming. Device failure detection would flag consumption anomalies the way the forgotten-lights reminder flags lights. Shelly's knowledge base still lists it as coming soon, while newer Gen4 device pages have started showing a Premium AI option for early issue detection, so it looks to be arriving model by model. Check your own device's settings before you subscribe for it.