Hyve Smart Package Locker Review: Protecting Your Holiday Deliveries

Rating:

7/10

The onslaught of tech gear being delivered for WIRED Reviews, combined with the samples I receive constantly for my side hustle at Drinkhacker, means that delivery trucks are a constant occurrence on my suburban street. UPS and FedEx both make drops at my house nearly every day, and that’s not to mention occasional deliveries from the likes of DHL and, of course, Amazon and its ilk. But it’s usually not a problem. I work from home, so picking up packages left on the doorstep is just part of the scenery.

What is a problem is that I can’t be home 24 hours a day, and even though I have a very kind neighbor across the way who keeps an eye out for boxes on my front steps when I’m traveling, he isn’t always at home either. Package hold requests aren’t consistently honored by either of the major carriers—and earlier this year, FedEx seemingly discontinued its vacation hold option without bothering to tell anyone, the modern epidemic of porch piracy be damned. (A rep has since confirmed this with me, though no formal announcement has ever been made.)

Having packages held at shipping centers or access points usually costs money, typically about $5 per package and often more depending on the length of the hold, and that involves a trip after I get home to collect what’s arrived. If I’m gone for a week, that can mean fetching a dozen boxes or more.

All of that is a time-consuming pain, for which a startup called Hyve has come along to offer an assuagement: A smart lockbox that lets delivery drivers drop off packages in a secure location, notifying the homeowner whenever it’s been accessed. While the growing pains were significant, after weeks of testing, I found it a useful device that—just maybe—may earn a permanent home on my front porch.

Locking and Loading

Parcel lockboxes aren’t exactly a new concept. They operate basically like a standard post office mailbox, with a cantilevered hatch up top that allows deliveries to drop into a secure storage area below, where they can only be accessed through a keyed door. Delivery folks can put packages in through the hatch, but only you can get them out.

The Hyve Smart Package Locker is a play on this idea, forgoing the two-chamber design in favor of an electronic hatch accessed via 4-digit PINs. The box itself measures 32 inches high, 20 inches wide, and 20 inches deep, with interior dimensions about 4 inches shorter in each direction. That makes for a total of 7.4 cubic feet, which Hyve says will fit 80 percent of Amazon package sizes (though obviously this depends on the specifics of your ordering habits). For me, that math worked out: Deliveries of three-pack bottles of wine fit fine, but anything larger was typically left out by the courier.

It’s built from a combination of plastic and steel, and while the side panels seem a little flimsy, there’s enough reinforcement behind them that I never worried that the unit would be easily damaged by a would-be package thief without power tools. Units are available in gray or white; I requested the latter to match my home’s color, but alas received a gray one.

Assembly is required—and be warned, it’s no cakewalk. The locker comes packed flat, notably with no printed instructions on how to put all the pieces together. A QR code in the box takes you to a web page featuring a walkthrough video and a PDF guide, which are my two least favorite ways to be guided through an installation process on a cell phone. The PDF is very difficult to read on a small screen, and this contributed to making what was already a cumbersome construction process even more difficult. I consider myself quite handy, but I ultimately spent nearly an hour putting the locker together due to a couple of easy-to-overlook goofs. Real, printed instructions—especially considering they’re all of five pages long—would go a long way toward streamlining the process. Or, better yet, why not just ship the thing preassembled?

A security bracket and cable tether are included so you can attach the Hyve to an immovable object on your property to prevent pirates from simply running off with the entire thing. (Unloaded, the device weighs 40 pounds. While awkward, it would be fairly easy to abscond with if it isn’t physically locked down.) Though oddly, the installation of these components is covered only in the video, not in the written instructions.

The unit is powered by four AA batteries and features a solar panel on top for trickle charging a backup battery. There’s also a USB-C port that can be used to supply emergency power if all else fails. Hyve says a fresh set of cells should last about five or six months, though strangely, my first quartet of AAs died inside of three weeks and without warning. There’s fortunately a USB-C port that can be used to supply emergency power if all else fails (which I needed when my cells died).

The Hyve Locker requires its own Wi-Fi bridge, which you must plug into an inside outlet near where you’ll be placing the locker. I found this to be a bit of a tall order, as I don’t have any power outlets in my entry hall, and an outlet only 15 feet away from the locker turned out to be out of range. (Exterior walls will do that to a wireless signal.) I ended up finding another outlet, forgotten in the guest room, that was able to reach the Hyve, but if that hadn’t worked, I would have been forced to relocate the locker elsewhere. Fortunately, the signal has held strong over several weeks of testing.

The Digital Side

Hyve’s app is deceptively simple. At its most basic, the homeowner sets a master PIN, which everyone uses for access to the locker to both make deliveries and to retrieve them. It’s a simple idea, but it obviously presents a bit of a security risk, since anyone with the four-digit code can pop the lid open and rifle through what’s inside. Whether this is a legitimate concern or not is perhaps a matter of personal risk tolerance. Due to the physical design of the device, there’s nothing preventing one courier from removing a package that another has left inside the Hyve, but then again, there’s nothing preventing them from taking an unattended package off your doorstep, either. Presumably for Hyve, and I would agree, random passers-by are the bigger concern for most homeowners, so the monolithic PIN mode is probably good enough for many users.

If you want more fine-grained security than the mono-PIN, you’ll need a subscription plan. Hyve’s Essentials subscription plan runs $5 per month or $50 per year, the main feature being that you can set separate PINs for each delivery service or carrier (including major shippers as well as services including DoorDash, Instacart, Best Buy, and more). With this setup, the app notifies you each time the lid is opened, and it tells you who opened it (or at least who employs them), logging it in the system. One month of Essentials is included with purchase.

What do you do with all these PINs? Alas, you’ll have to go it alone, though Hyve provides detailed advice on how to enter the PIN and information about the lockbox into each carrier’s delivery instructions page on their website. You’ll need an account with each carrier, tied to your address, and I found that some of these instructions are more useful than others. Both FedEx and UPS, for example, provide fields for entering gate codes, but neither lets you specify specifically that packages should be left in a lockbox. (Both used to offer free-form delivery instruction fields, but these have recently changed into more simplified drop-down systems, and “lockbox” is not a choice for a delivery location.)

Hyve offers an even higher-level subscription tier called the Hyve Returns Plan. For $15 per month, subscribers can have items picked up from their Hyve box at no additional charge by Hyve’s own fleet of couriers—namely, returns headed for other carriers that would otherwise require you to request a manual pickup or to ferry the item to a drop-off location yourself. Return pickups are not on demand but rather operate on a set schedule, twice a month, with the dates listed in the Hyve app. The catch? Hyve Returns are only available in Los Angeles and Seattle at the moment; Hyve says it is monitoring usage across the country to determine when and how to roll out the service to other regions, but my expectation is that will be a slow process.

If you don’t have the Hyve Returns subscription but do have Essentials, you can still use the Hyve for on-demand returns by scheduling a pickup through Uber Courier, with no additional charges due to Hyve. The trick with this scheme is that while you avoid the $15 subscription fee, you have to pay Uber’s service charge for the pickup. Those fees vary based on the distance to your nearest UPS, FedEx, or Amazon drop-off location. For me, the Uber Courier charge for dropping off an Amazon return typically ranged from $8–18, making the $15 twice-monthly return plan far more enticing than the ad hoc option. (But alas, unavailable to me.)

I did test the alternate method by using Uber Courier to create a return, and found that Hyve didn’t add much to the equation. The only difference with Hyve is that instead of grabbing the item from the doorstep, the driver fetched it from the bin with a PIN. More secure? Yes, but given that I only had to wait 20 minutes for the driver to show up, the risk of an exposed package was minimal compared to receiving a delivery when I wasn’t home for days.

So, About Those Secure Deliveries

While the lockbox is rather obtrusive on my front porch, the hardware works well. The weatherproofing is fine, the door opens and closes with a satisfying, locking click, and the box sounds an alarm if it’s left open for too long. Push notifications from the Hyve mobile app come quickly and accurately, letting you know whether it was FedEx or Amazon—or you—that opened the hatch.

There is, unfortunately, a catch, and at first I found it to be an awfully big one. The problem was that no delivery driver seemed to want to use the Hyve locker, no matter how much I tried to get them to.

After getting everything set up on day one, I waited with anticipation when FedEx arrived with a box, and my phone lit up with a text from the company that the delivery had been completed. Alas, it was not in the Hyve locker but sitting next to it, nestled against the exterior. I was crestfallen, yet undeterred, and kept trying to get someone to open that hatch.

The next day, I encountered the FedEx driver in person, only because he rang the bell because he had a delivery with a signature required. I asked if he had seen the delivery instructions on my FedEx account and, with a puzzled look, said that he “thought he heard something” when pulling up to my house. It turns out that FedEx’s driver devices provide verbal instructions on where to leave packages (in addition to rather garbled written ones, which he showed me), but that he had the volume on his device turned down. Clad in my bathrobe, I demonstrated the Hyve to him personally and got his buy-in.

The following day, I was thrilled to get a push notification from the Hyve app that FedEx had successfully left a box for me inside. The driver even rang the bell again, only to show me his success with a smile. I tell you, opening that hatch and seeing my package inside was like Christmas morning for both of us.

Alas, on the third day, a fresh FedEx delivery appeared on the porch again. My driver had moved to another route.

But Then …

I was about to give up on the whole shebang when, all of a sudden, something clicked. FedEx, UPS, and Amazon all started using the Hyve locker, and regularly. I soon became accustomed to getting notifications multiple times a day that the box had received a delivery, with my estimation of its usage rate approaching 75 percent. No longer was my doorstep darkened with cardboard, as trips to empty out the Hyve became an undertaking necessary to complete several times a day.

In fact, on some days, the usage level revealed an entirely new problem: A single UPS delivery of a few boxes could fill the locker, leaving no room for anything else. My hopes of leaving for a week and not having to worry about packages were dashed; there’s just not enough space for more than a day or two at most in the bin, given the pace of deliveries at my house.

Early on in my testing, I spoke to Hyve about the usage issues I was experiencing at the time, and its CEO freely admitted that this is, in no uncertain terms, a problem for many homeowners. To combat it, the company provides an adhesive sign that you can use to instruct carriers to use the box, and while this was likely quite helpful at improving usage rates, it’s not a panacea (nor is it particularly attractive).

And over a Zoom call, the CEO showed me another innovation that she said was having even better results: Attaching a placard that reads “Snack Stop” to the top of the lockbox, and stocking a collection of treats like chips and meat sticks inside for hungry drivers, encouraging them to open it up to grab a bite when making their rounds. What delivery driver could possibly say no to a free Slim Jim?