Make All of Your Lighting Smart for less than $7 a Bulb This Prime Day

This story is part of Amazon Prime Day, CNET’s guide to everything you need to know and how to find the best deals.

Over the last year, I have made a concerted effort to turn my home into a smart one. I wanted to be able to control everything from a few different Alexa devices scattered around my home, or from the smart home hub on my Google Pixel. There are a lot of things you can buy to make your home smarter like thermostats and TVs but nothing is as cheap as fixing your lighting. These smart bulbs from GE are just $6.16 this Prime Day, making them the cheapest and easiest way to start your smart home experience.

In an effort to make every room in my house have a smart light I considered two things: Do I want fancy colors and do I want switches or bulbs? The first part was easy to answer. I wasn’t looking for anything colorful, I just needed normal lighting for each room in the house that I could turn off from anywhere. The second part was a little trickier.

I ended up going with the GE Bulbs over light switches simply because of the price. A smart switch is often around $15 to $20 and while you need fewer of them — you often have more than one light bulb in a room after all — the price difference just didn’t make sense. At just over six bucks you can outfit a standard three-bedroom house — say around 12 bulbs in seven rooms — for $72 rather than the $140 switches could cost.

Setting them up was a breeze, though you do have to set up each individual bulb. That can be connected via Bluetooth if you want but I would suggest using Wi-Fi for the best result. You will need to set them up individually and you’ll have to set them up on your 2.4Ghz band on your router, but these are simple steps that only need to be done once. Also, remember that your light switch will need to be on all the time for the bulbs to work.

I’m really happy with how it turned out with these bulbs. I have several different Alexa routines set up to take advantage of them so they turn on when I need them to and turn off when I say goodnight. And if I forget to turn them off when I leave the house, I can use the app or Google assistant to do it anywhere in the world. I paid nearly $10 a bulb for my setup so you’ll be saving a big chunk of change if you pick them up this Prime Day.