I've had a couple Ring cams for years. I hate the network, hate having to pay for the cloud storage, I've just been too lazy to research self-hosted alternatives. Is there solution you'd recommend that's relatively polished and easy to use?
I've been looking for cheap optionally non-cloud camera recently and cycled through 15 different vendors on amazon buying, testing, probing, and returning.
Here's what I found.
If you don't want to pay a lot, there's something called "wansview" which is a white-label to a number of cheap amazon cameras (sub $20). You can do ONVIF and RTSP on any of the wansview firmwared devices and then knock them off the internet to keep it local.
Most recommendations of cameras for things like home assistant point to things at rolls-royce prices (~sometimes 20x the cost of the cheap consumer ones).
You shouldn't have to pony up a 2,000% markup for the feature "has tcp port open for rtsp"
You can do on-device storage and stream over network ... no cloud subscription needed and no huge price tag.
If you're looking for others, you don't even need to buy the camera and check. Just scroll through the marketing jpegs on the amazon page. If they have screenshots with wansview you're good.
It's the only vendor I've found that does this.
This should be long term stable. If they decided to remove it you'd have to manually "upgrade" the firmware - which you won't have to do.
They seem to come with the same capabilities. I assume they farm out the firmware to someone else that they license from, then they get the firmware at basically free in the hope that the firmware maker will push their cloud product but this is all speculation.
These are all working "on the reservation" - I'm not flashing anything. There's always a risk but I think these are just cameras.
They might be running a spy rig side hustle but they open up their ports. I haven't gotten two way audio or the camera motor to move around on the ONVIF protocol yet but there's "profiles" that can do this ... I'll just have to see if the cameras respond to those profiles.
If not I'll contact Wansview.
In my experience with Chinese companies when I contact them about things like this they treat me as if I'm about to pull the trigger on 100,000 of them so who knows, maybe wansview is the win here.
It is not really cheap, nor best "value for the dollar", but I am extremely satisfied with UniFi [0]. Nearly instant setup, decent mobile apps, web interface, basically just works as you need.
So this link redirects to a page that wants me to either create an account, or log into one I already have, before it will tell me anything about this product. Sorry, no.
while i agree that unifi is worth looking at, id urge anyone reading this to be a little weery there:
i used to own extensive unifi equipment for my home network, 8 access points, 2 switches, gateway, a couple cams, etc… it was amazing, the initial setup, the interoperability, the stability and maintenance was absolutely painless. i will loudly sing them praises for those things, but i started noticing them trying to jam cloud features and subscriptions behind paywalls deeper into the integration, it’s pretty obvious that its only a matter of time before they enshitify with pay-for-features paywalled behind subscriptions, cloud first, etc…
keep that in mind before you dive headfirst. their stuff was perfect in that stability sweet spot of better than small office but not quite enterprise tier local only configurations, but i personally dipped as soon as i saw what i think is the writing in the wall.
i love their stuff, genuinely i did, but if the goal is to move further away from subscriptions and cloud-first, be very cautious of their current trajectory.
I did a full security system replacement for my previous employer in our data center. Replaced all the old IP cameras that connected directly to a small black box nvr with UniFi camera recording onto a UniFi Video server writing to a NAS cable locked to the rack in our locked data center. Two months later UniFi Video was discontinued and stopped receiving updates or support. If we wanted a supported platform we had to purchase a UniFi Protect NVR with less storage and less power/network redundancy than what I built. Plus all access to UniFi Protect would run through their cloud portal.
This makes me wonder if it's inevitable for every hardware/software provider to be tempted by the candy now. Makes me ask myself if I could even resist it if I had a customer base with sunk costs who I could take advantage of. My feeling is that I could resist it, on principle, but most people wouldn't. And this is leaving out pressure from investors.
So such a company selling these solutions as locally run widgets - which we understand are under not just pressure to increase revenue, but also relentless pressure from governments to share their data - would definitely need to be completely self-funded, immediately profitable, and the solutions they sold would have to be permanent and not susceptible to any external market or government forces.
Zero updates and zero tracking of installations would be the goal.
[edit] but this is also not that hard. All the company needs to provide is a piece of software that stitches together existing hardware. The only updates would be when hardware updates, and those would be included in the price. If "NEVER CLOUD" was the company's entire corporate identity, then preserving that ethos would be a mandate.
[edit2] nevercloud.com is currently on sale for $8350. I'd suggest building the prime directive into the name, but that much money has better uses.
>all access to UniFi Protect would run through their cloud portal.
I have a unvr and protect and nothing runs through their portal, I connect directly to the ip address of the unvr. You can cut internet access off on the vlan and everything works fine.
I'll second this, also adding that while it remains more of a project to setup Frigate has made significant advances over the last few years and has improved a lot. So if you previously looked at it and were put off, might be worth looking at again.
Also fwiw, if someone is willing to spin up a Windows VM or are running that stack anyway than Blue Iris is probably the default contender for local security software, well polished. I know a few people who still keep a single remaining W10 with GPU passthrough install just for that, not even for games anymore where Linux has gotten good enough in the last few years.
All of this though benefits a lot from already having some sort of homelab and/or self-hosted stack. If you do then the marginal investment may be pretty minimal and value quite high as you use it for a lot of other stuff. If starting from scratch it's a lot more of a haul which of course is precisely why a lot of people use other solutions.
It works with cheap, generic IP cameras over RTSP. It's pretty easy to get it working with a Raspberry Pi too.
I was using the synology surveillance app, but after their recent shenanigans, I wanted something I could self host and modify on my own.
I'm using it at my property with 14 cameras right now and I'm really happy with it. There's still some work to do, but it's integrated with ML object detection, and even integration with a VLLM to describe a scene when certain things are detected.
This was my first attempt at a large-scale application that is heavily AI assisted. I need to update the screenshots and feature list for the readme, but if you have any questions or want to get involved, let me know.
I have a couple cheap Wyze cams aimed at my front door/porch at different angles. They record on a loop to SD cards. Qyze has cloud stuff, but you don't have to subscribe to it. They're like $30 each and supremely hackable.
I bought a house that had 2 ring cameras installed. After I heard about the flock deal, I simply removed them and have no exterior cameras.
I run frigate for some interior cameras (cheap esp32s) to watch my 3d printer, etc. It's been stable and easy to use for me, but I can't comment on using it for actual surveillance.
SimplySafe can be use with or withut a cloud subscription. With cloud, you are really paying for the monitoring (the discount I get from home owners insurance for monitored fire/co detectors alone pays for the subscription).
Eufy C120 is $35 and you can put an SD card in it for continuous recording and no cloud subscription required. Can watch the camera and playback any time using the app, no cost.
I just try to look for companies that are a bit smaller in the space. Some of these features only work when you have enough coverage. Small companies don't have that.
Others have given suggestions, but I'd also like to suggest evaluating what value you are actually getting from these devices. Would your life be made vastly worse if you just, didn't have them at all? They may have some real utility for you, in which case don't let me stop you from putting the effort in. But I think it's worth a few minutes to think about whether the value you get from these devices is actually worth the effort for you.
aqara g410 can be setup so that it uploads to your private iCloud and is viewable within Apple Home. I found it to be the most polished setup that is also light work and alleviates some of the concern. Quality is great as well. But for a on prem setup, frigate and armcrest seems to get alot of love.
I have an Arlo, which allows me to put an SD card in the base station to record locally. No cloud bullshit. Of course, they still try to push you to their cloud bullshit, but keeping it local is free (from monthly fees). Works great, even integrates with Homekit.
