A Ring, Nest or Arlo doorbell is half a product. The camera is the hardware half; the £5-15/month subscription for cloud storage and smart alerts is the other half, and it never stops. Swap to an ONVIF/RTSP-capable doorbell and run Frigate, Home Assistant and a small VPS instead, and you get the same person/vehicle/package detection and phone notifications for a one-off camera cost plus about £3-4 a month, with no recurring fee that creeps up every renewal.
Your doorbell is already an IoT device, you just don’t own the other half of it
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you unbox a Ring or Nest doorbell: you’ve bought a camera with Wi-Fi and a chip in it, and you’re renting the part that actually makes it useful. The doorbell itself connects to your network, streams footage to the manufacturer’s cloud, runs AI to tell a person apart from a passing cat, and pushes a notification to your phone. That entire chain, every link of it except the physical doorbell, is a subscription. Stop paying, and the hardware you own becomes a camera that rings a bell and not much else.
That’s a genuinely reasonable business model for the company selling it to you. It’s a worse deal for you than it looks on the box.
What this actually costs over five years
A single Ring Protect plan for one camera starts around $5/month (roughly £4), with unlimited-camera plans landing nearer $10/month (roughly £8). Nest Aware runs around $8/month for unlimited cameras, with the higher Plus tier nearer $15-20. Arlo Secure starts around $8/month for a single camera or $13/month for unlimited cameras on one account. Exact figures shift by region and change over time, and these are US prices converted loosely since both brands price slightly differently in the UK, but the shape doesn’t change: somewhere between £4 and £15 a month, forever, for as long as you own the camera.
| Provider | Typical monthly cost | 5-year cost (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Ring Protect (unlimited cameras) | ~£8/mo | ~£480 |
| Nest Aware (unlimited cameras) | ~£7/mo | ~£420 |
| Arlo Secure (unlimited cameras) | ~£10/mo | ~£600 |
| Self-hosted (VPS + one-off camera cost) | ~£3-4/mo | ~£180-240, plus a camera you’d have bought anyway |
That’s £250-450 saved over five years on a single household, more if you add the two or three extra cameras most people end up wanting once the first one proves useful, since every one of those big-brand plans either charges per camera or pushes you into a pricier “unlimited” tier the moment you add a second.
The alternative, in plain terms
Swap a Ring or Nest doorbell for one that speaks ONVIF or RTSP, open standards almost every serious camera brand outside the big three subscription ecosystems supports: Reolink, UniFi’s G4 doorbell, and several Hikvision and Dahua models all qualify, typically for similar or even lower upfront cost than a comparable Ring. That camera streams its video over your own network rather than locking it inside a vendor’s app, which is the one change that makes everything else in this guide possible.
From there, three pieces of free, open-source software do what Ring Protect was charging you for:
- Frigate, an NVR that watches your camera streams and uses AI to detect people, vehicles and packages specifically, rather than just “something moved”, the same kind of smart detection Ring and Nest charge extra for.
- Home Assistant, which turns a Frigate detection into an actual phone notification, with a snapshot, and lets you build automations around it (turn on a light, announce on a smart speaker, whatever you want).
- Mosquitto, the MQTT broker that lets Frigate and Home Assistant talk to each other, the same self-hosted broker covered throughout the rest of this site.
Where the VPS actually fits in (and an honesty checkpoint)
This is the part worth being straight about rather than overselling. Frigate’s AI detection genuinely needs real CPU power to decode video streams, that’s the expensive part, not the AI inference itself, which a small accelerator chip can offload cheaply. A £3/month VPS is not the right place to run Frigate’s actual video decoding and detection. That part runs locally: a cheap mini PC or a Raspberry Pi with a Google Coral or similar accelerator, sat at home where the camera footage already is, so you’re not trying to stream raw video up a typical home broadband connection’s upload speed to a remote server either.
What the VPS is genuinely excellent for: the secure remote-access layer. A WireGuard tunnel so you can reach your home setup securely from anywhere without opening ports on your router, an always-on relay for notifications so your phone gets alerted even if your home internet has a brief wobble, and a small dashboard if you want one central place to check in on things, all for the £3-4/month this guide’s title promises. Local hardware does the heavy lifting; the VPS does the part that needs to be always-on and reachable from outside your house.
Notifications: the part people worry about most
This is usually the first question: “how do I actually get a phone alert when someone’s at the door, without paying anyone?” Two genuinely solid free options:
- The Home Assistant Companion App (iOS and Android), the natural choice if you’re already running Home Assistant for the rest of your smart home. It supports actionable notifications, meaning the alert itself can include buttons (view snapshot, ignore, mark as expected) without opening the app.
- ntfy.sh, a much simpler, lightweight self-hosted push notification tool, worth knowing about if you want notifications without committing to the full Home Assistant ecosystem. A script publishes to a topic via a simple HTTP request, and the ntfy mobile app delivers it to your phone, genuinely that straightforward.
Either approach replaces exactly what Ring’s app notification was doing, minus the subscription.
A realistic architecture, start to finish
Doorbell streams over your home network to local Frigate, running on a small mini PC or Pi with an AI accelerator. Frigate detects a person, publishes the event to your Mosquitto broker. Home Assistant, watching that broker, sends a phone notification with a snapshot attached. Your VPS, reachable from anywhere via WireGuard, gives you a way to check the dashboard or footage remotely without exposing anything directly to the internet, and acts as a reliable relay if you want notifications to keep working even through a brief home broadband outage.
What this is genuinely not for
Worth being honest: if you want zero setup time, a polished single app, and don’t mind paying for that convenience indefinitely, Ring or Nest remain a perfectly reasonable choice, and there’s no shame in that trade. This guide is for the household willing to spend an afternoon setting things up once in exchange for never paying a subscription fee again, and for owning the actual data rather than renting access to it.
Where to go next
If a VPS is still a new concept, What Is a VPS? is the natural starting point. Ready to set up the secure remote-access piece specifically, Home Assistant Remote Access Without the Cloud walks through it directly. And once this proves out for the doorbell, the exact same VPS comfortably extends to a full smart home dashboard, solar monitoring, and eventually the same pattern this site’s industrial guides use for entire fleets of equipment.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to throw away my existing Ring or Nest doorbell?
If it only works within its own ecosystem (most Ring and Nest hardware does), yes, this specific approach needs a camera that speaks ONVIF or RTSP instead. It’s a genuine hardware swap, not just a software change, which is the one real upfront cost of going this route.
Is Frigate actually as good at detecting people and packages as Ring’s AI?
In most users’ real-world experience, yes, often better, since Frigate lets you tune detection zones and sensitivity precisely to your own property, something the big subscription platforms deliberately keep simplified. It takes a bit more initial configuration to get there.
Can I do this with the cameras I already own if they’re not Ring or Nest?
If your existing cameras already support ONVIF or RTSP, which most non-subscription brands do, yes, you can likely skip the camera purchase entirely and go straight to setting up Frigate and Home Assistant.
How technical does this actually get?
Genuinely approachable for anyone willing to follow a guide and use a command line a little, considerably less intimidating than it sounds from the outside. None of the individual pieces, Frigate, Home Assistant, a small VPS, require deep networking or programming knowledge to get working.
What happens to footage if my home internet goes down?
Local recording continues uninterrupted, since Frigate and your cameras are all on your home network regardless of internet status. What you’d lose temporarily is remote viewing and notifications until connectivity returns, the same limitation any system has.
A realistic weekend, not a vague “afternoon”
It’s worth being concrete about what this actually takes rather than hand-waving “a bit of setup”. Day one: mount the new camera or doorbell, get it talking to your network over ONVIF or RTSP, and get Frigate running on the local mini PC or Pi, watching the stream and confirming detection works on a test walk past the camera. Day two: wire up Home Assistant, get a test notification arriving on your phone, then set up the VPS and WireGuard tunnel so the whole thing is reachable remotely. Most people doing this for the first time, following a guide rather than improvising from scratch, land somewhere around a single weekend, with the doorbell itself the quickest part and the notification and remote-access plumbing taking the bulk of the time.
What it actually feels like once it’s running
The day-to-day experience, once set up, is genuinely close to what Ring or Nest offered, a phone notification with a snapshot when someone’s at the door, the ability to pull up a live view remotely, a searchable history of past events. The differences show up less in daily use and more at the edges: no monthly reminder that a subscription renewed, no surprise when a manufacturer changes their app’s layout or discontinues a feature, and a genuinely customisable detection zone that ignores the postman’s van driving past without ignoring an actual visitor walking up the path, the kind of fine-tuning the big subscription platforms deliberately keep simple rather than configurable.
What to budget for upfront, beyond the doorbell itself
Being honest about total upfront cost, not just the ongoing £3-4/month: an ONVIF-capable doorbell or camera (often similar in price to a comparable Ring model), a small mini PC or Raspberry Pi to run Frigate locally (a one-off cost, reusable for additional cameras later), optionally an AI accelerator like a Coral or Hailo module if you want detection to stay snappy as you add more cameras, and the VPS itself. For a single doorbell, this typically lands in a similar ballpark to buying a Ring doorbell outright, with the ongoing saving starting to accumulate from month one rather than needing years to break even.
Is there a halfway option if I don’t want to replace my doorbell yet?
Yes, many people start by adding one ONVIF-capable camera elsewhere (a side gate, a garden) alongside their existing Ring doorbell, getting comfortable with Frigate and Home Assistant before eventually swapping the doorbell itself once the rest of the setup is proven and trusted.
Will neighbours or visitors notice anything different about how this doorbell behaves?
Not really, from the outside it looks and behaves like any video doorbell, a chime, a camera, a light. The difference is entirely behind the scenes in where the footage goes and who controls the notification logic.
Can I still get a doorbell chime inside the house, or is it phone notifications only?
Most ONVIF-capable doorbells include their own physical chime or wired chime compatibility, the same as Ring; this guide’s changes are about where the footage and intelligence live, not about removing the physical doorbell experience itself.