Garage Door Left Open Alert with an Old Phone, No Sensor, No Subscription

A garage door left open all night is an open invitation to whoever walks past. Most people only notice in the morning. A spare phone pointed at the door and one sentence in plain English can tell you the moment it is still open when it should be shut.

The problem with just remembering to close it

The garage is the door people forget. You carry in the groceries, get distracted, and it sits open for hours. Smart openers with built in alerts exist, but they mean replacing the opener or mounting a tilt sensor, pairing a hub, and often a monthly app subscription to keep the notifications. A plain contact sensor only knows open or closed, so it pings you every single time you park, and you quickly learn to ignore it. What you actually want is a nudge only when the door is left open when it should not be.

How AI watching is different

AI Vision Monitor uses a vision AI model that understands what it is looking at. You point any spare phone at the garage and write the trigger yourself, in normal language:

"Alert me if the garage door is still open after 10pm."
"Tell me if the garage door is open and the car is not there."
"Notify me if the garage door has been open for more than 30 minutes."

The app checks the scene at the interval you choose and keeps previous frames for context, so parking the car and closing the door behind you does not trigger anything, but a door forgotten at midnight does.

Setup in 3 minutes

  1. Prop any spare phone (even a 5-year-old Android) on a shelf, a workbench, or a bracket with a clear view of the garage door from inside or across the driveway. Plug it into a charger.
  2. Install AI Vision Monitor and describe what should alert you in one sentence. Any language works.
  3. Pick a check interval and a time window, for example every 15 minutes during the evening, and start monitoring. Alerts arrive as push or email.

What does watching the garage cost?

With a light AI model (0.5 credits per check) and a check every 15 minutes across a 6-hour evening window:
24 checks x 0.5 credits = 12 credits, about 0.015 euro per night on the 2.50 euro starter pack.

New users get 50 free credits, enough to watch the garage for weeks before paying anything. No card required, no subscription ever.

What people watch their garage for

Get it on Google Play iOS Beta (TestFlight)

FAQ

Do I need a smart opener or a garage sensor?
No. Any spare Android phone or tablet is the whole setup. No opener swap, no wiring, no hub, no subscription.

Will parking the car every day cause false alarms?
No. This is not a contact switch. The AI evaluates your described condition against the scene, with previous frames as context, so only a door that is actually left open when you said it should be closed will alert you.

Does it work offline?
The phone needs internet. Analysis runs server side, which is exactly why an old device works fine as a garage camera.

Can it replace a real security camera?
Different tool. A security camera records everything for later. AI Vision Monitor is the zero setup option when you have a spare phone and want a plain language alert about one specific thing, the open door, the missing car, the change, for your garage and for anything else you point it at.