5% of people know how to work on-prem and big players don't offer it as a solution. Your ring camera would be much more expensive if it included 1TB storage, processing, dedupes, backups, playback, etc.
I have a Eufy camera setup that uses in-home storage. There’s about a year of data on a 64GB SD card that cost maybe $30.
You’re buying a camera. Amazon is getting a perpetual license to everything that happened in front of your home, forever. The cloud story is about analytics and data mining. You buy a camera, they get a feed.
Same box would decrypt data on read for authorized user.
AMZN wants to monetize your feed?
Sell them subscription for access the feed with clear usage license. No sneaky, default, subtle crap "we will use your data and monetize it forever at our will without your concent"
Did you have to Port forward or set up a VPN for local viewing? Just that will stop 95% of users.
You don't need anywhere near 1TB of storage if you're only storing video when there's motion, and that smaller amount of storage has minimal cost. You also can't really dedup a series of unique videos anyway. And processing and playback cost nothing when done locally; pretty much all the rest of it is software.
All "cloud" really gets you is backups, which is more of a nice-to-have than a necessity for video which is going to get auto-deleted on a schedule regardless and can be manually backed up any time it becomes relevant to retain. You could also get automatic backups without "cloud" for any system that spans multiple sites, which is the case for most businesses and even an individual with any family member or friend who uses the same system.