Do you rent or own your place? If you have the ability to run Ethernet drops to camera points imo the best solution by far is to get poe cameras. Amcrest/reolink are good options. You’ll need a poe switch, this can be expensive but you can pick them up cheap used if you look for old ones sold as ewaste. I got mine for $40 and it has 24 ports which is far more cameras than I’ll ever need.

Similarly, you can get a nvr, which is basically a poe switch with a built in management system and a slot for a hard drive. These can be a couple hundred. Or you can get an old ewaste pc, like literally an $50-$100 sff core i3 pc from an office off ebay. Thow a decent sized hard drive in this, the bigger it is the more recording you can do. I have this connected to my home server for storage so if you have a home server/NAS that’s also an option but not necessary, just gives you more record time and eliminates the need for buying a computer to act as a server.

Then software to tie it all together: ZoneMinder Moonfire NVR Frigate MotionEyeOS OS-NVR Are all good options Also closed source options like shinobi, I spy, blueiris, and a ton of others

Not revealing my specific setup for opsec

This imo is the best possible setup. For one, it sounds expensive but ultimately costs just a bit more. You can get super expensive poe cameras but comparable poe cameras to wyze/eufy/etc are often a bit cheaper because they don’t have the WiFi nonsense built in. Of course, you pay that back with the switch and server.

But the bigger thing is reliability and customization. Before this I had a eufy cam setup. They were wireless which was admittedly easier to setup, no fishing wires. But every couple days I’d get notifications “camera x is unavailable” for no reason. My home has a very solid mesh WiFi network with several APs. The cameras are just shit and drop connection randomly. Sometimes they’ll be on for 4 weeks straight, sometimes they’ll disconnect 20 times an day. If you have a setup with 10 cameras it means one is always doing it.

Then eufy came out and was server siding thumbnail id images, despite claiming to never do this. Then they doubled down on this, and took away the guarantee that they wouldn’t “cloud” your shit. Essentially they would do “ai” facial recognition server side because their little base stations aren’t powerful enough. They’d then store thumbnails of recognized users for future id purposes. This caused me to sell the eufy cameras and go poe. The poe cameras work in an isolated vlan, eg the cameras and all their features work without a connection to the internet and I can tunnel to my server to view them remotely. You don’t need to have this setup but I’d recommend it if you can

Finally going off the above with your own server and your own hardware you can do whatever. Eufy had ai recognition but it was shitty. I’m sure it’s improved a bit. I’ve found running the models locally appears to be better, more features like yard perimeters, object detection, etc. you can also separate the ai model from the nvr software, etc. frigate is an interesting potential here, still needs some growth wrt object detection but if they get it a bit more mature imo will be a serious contender