I've been running Frigate for more than two years now and it beats the hell out of any system I've tried in terms of detection speed and reliability. For context, I've tried Ring, Tapo cameras, and also Eufy security. Today I have turned away from all the cameras except for the Tapo cameras now serving RTSP streams into my Frigate instance. I have also blocked them from accessing the internet and that gave it complete privacy by default.

Eufy Security started showing advertisements about their new products whenever I tap on a motion detected notification. They prioritize their ads over your own security which is ridiculous. Not just that, some of their clips stored in their cloud storage would never open despite the fact I used to pay them my membership fees every month. They were also caught storing passwords and other security credentials in plain text. Thanks to them, they were the primary motivation for me to move away from using those proprietary platforms and look for something self-hosted.

I got Frigate running on my old hardware with hardware acceleration enabled via RX 550 GPU and detection is always under one second. I wrote a small app that uses Frigate API to grab screenshots and send me notifications via Telegram and Pushover. It's been very self-sustainable for two years now. I only had to restart the service two times in all of this time. I am also using some tunneling from my VPS into the locally hosted Frigate running on my home server and it's just been flawless. Thanks to this amazing project.