About this site

What this site is

A home security camera site organised around running cost rather than sticker price.

Most camera round-ups rank on image quality and mention subscriptions in a sentence near the end. That gets the weighting backwards for the way people actually lose money in this category: a cheap camera on a monthly plan costs more across five years than an expensive one that records to a card.

So the ranking favours cameras that record and keep footage with no plan at all. The few that need one are still listed, because some households will pay for the polish, and each says so on its card with the five-year arithmetic beside it.

How a pick gets made

Roughly half of the weighting is what the Amazon listing actually commits to in writing, because that is the only specification the seller is accountable for. About a quarter is the running-cost structure: whether footage can be stored locally, and what a plan withholds if you decline it. The last quarter is how well the product answers the questions buyers in this category keep asking, which is where the worries section on the home page comes from.

Ratings and review counts are reported, never adjusted. Where a listing's rating is shared across sibling variants, the page says so instead of presenting it as a verdict on one model.

Where the numbers come from

Everything here was checked against the Amazon listings on October 27, 2026.

Specifications are the ones each Amazon listing states. Where a listing does not publish a figure, the page says Not listed rather than borrowing one from somewhere else. Plan prices come from each maker's own pricing page, and the five-year figures use the plan shapes stated next to the calculator.

Prices are shown as bands rather than exact figures, because they change week to week and the listing is always the authority on what you will pay. Where a listing's price looked wrong when we checked, no band is shown and the card points you to the listing instead.

Ratings and review counts are copied as the listing shows them. Some listings are variants of a parent listing and share its rating; where that happens the card says the rating is shared. Anything with fewer than 200 ratings carries a thin-record note.

24 products are ranked on the home page. A handful of models that other round-ups rank are linked as exact-model searches until we have checked them properly.

What this site does not do

There is no lab here and no claim of hands-on testing. Nothing on this site reports a measurement we took, because we did not take any. Where a camera has no independent testing behind it, the page says so rather than filling the gap with adjectives.

We do not publish invented ratings, invented user quotes, or specifications that are not in the listing. A blank in a comparison table is written as Not listed. Product covers are flat illustrations drawn for this site and are labelled as illustrations; no Amazon product photography is copied or hotlinked.

And the limit that matters most: a camera does not prevent a burglary. It records one. Anything on this site that reads like a safety promise is badly written, and we would rather hear about it.