“Starting 11 March 2024, the price of Ring Protect Basic will change from £34.99/year to £49.99/year per device. If you would like to keep your current plan, no further action is required. Your plan will renew at the new price, unless you cancel your subscription before your next renewal on or after 11 March 2024.”
Arse clowns.
What would be a good alternative? I don’t trust Google.
A doorbell
And a peephole
A glory hole for your visitors.
Aqara G4 just cut out the middle man send it stright to the CCP :D Jokes aside it allows easy backups to NAS and SD they have a 2 week retention without subscription. I’m not sure how it would behave if you sanboxed it. EDIT looking at the other suggestions Reolink is just better all round.
Homeassisant with pi-zero with pi cam would be my GOTO if I wanted a more DIY open-source approach.
I use the Reolink PoE (they also do a wifi version). Cost about £70, and works well.
All communication can stay inside your LAN if you want it to.
I have a backlog task to integrate it into homeassistant.
I did a quick look for the best one to integrate with HA and found that one. I don’t need one but it’s good to have a reasonably priced option to recommend.
Yep, it’s a little cracker. Also the chime box has several perfectly silly chimes.
+1 for Reolink
You can roll your own, using raspberry pi’s and usb cameras, and home assistant if you want a fully automated house. This solution is not for the average consumer, so you would have to read a lot and be comfortable installing Linux.
The Evening Standard has done an overview.
Things to bear in mind are that you are paying for convenience, so expect to do more fiddling about to get it done.what you want, especially if want remote access without paying for cloud features. However, if you are setting up a smart home and so are already down for some fiddling you are good.
One thing: unless you are diligent at changing batteries, wire it in. So many smart doorbells don’t work because people seem to forget about them.
A butler
If you are part of the Apple ecosystem, look at Homekit Video devices. All the recognition processing is done locally (on your Homepod or Apple TV, if you want remote access and recording and you have existing iCloud storage, you can use that.
I use Arlo doorbell and the floodlight, both battery operated and only need to connect to WiFi. Pretty good products although the smart notifications can get buggy from time to time.
Battery life on the doorbell is around 5 weeks, floodlight about 8 weeks.
Costs could be cheaper or more expensive than the ring.
If you just have a doorbell it should be cheaper over the year. Gets expensive when you add more cameras.