Your cameras. Your property.
Why is your footage on someone else's server?

The case for local storage

Cloud camera subscriptions have quietly become a tax

The big-name cloud camera vendors charge per camera, per month, forever — and the fee usually covers only a couple weeks of retention. Miss a payment or let the subscription lapse, and your history is gone. Want to pull footage for an insurance claim? You're downloading it from their servers, on their timeline, under their terms of service. For a business with eight cameras, cloud fees alone can exceed the cost of owning the entire system within a few years.

Ownership: the footage is evidence — it should be yours

With a local NVR on your property, recordings belong to you the moment they're captured. No terms-of-service change can take them away, no vendor outage can lock you out during an incident, and no subscription lapse can delete your history. When your insurer or the sheriff's office needs footage, you export it yourself, same day.

Cost: pay for hardware once, not retention forever

Our packages bundle hardware, installation, and monitoring into year one, then drop to monitoring-only pricing — the Starter package runs $89/month in year one and $40/month after, with 30-day local retention included. There is no per-camera cloud fee at any tier, and the hardware is your property after the initial agreement.

Privacy & bandwidth: footage that never leaves the building

Local storage means video of your customers, patients, or staff isn't streaming to a third-party data center 24/7 — a real consideration for medical offices and law firms with confidentiality obligations. It also means your internet connection isn't saturated with constant uploads; rural East Texas bandwidth is better spent running your business.

You still get remote viewing

Local storage doesn't mean stone age. Every system includes secure remote viewing through the UniFi Protect app — check the lot from your phone at midnight, get motion alerts, review clips. The difference is where the archive lives: on your NVR, not on a subscription server. If you want off-site redundancy, optional cloud replication is available — your choice, not a requirement.