[soylentcola]

I've always been a fan of iSpy (https://www.ispyconnect.com/) and still occasionally mess with it even though my couple of cheapo cameras (a Foscam and a Dahua) now just record on motion to my Synology NAS.

I think I messed with Blue Iris when I was initially playing with using an old laptop as an IP cam DVR but never bought it after the trial expired.

[joenathan]

Looks like to get the most out of iSpy you need a subscription, starting at $8 per month and going up to $50 per month, sorry no thanks. Blue Iris is a one time fee, I get SMS and email alerts included. I don't like paying subscriptions for things that I'm hosting myself.

[soylentcola]

Sorry for the late reply. I never used any of the "pro" options so I guess it never came up for me. It's like Plex in that regard, at least how I personally use it. I just use iSpy as a free, flexible program I can run on an old computer, attach it to the same LAN as the IP cameras, and set it up for motion detection, recording, and storage/archive.

I definitely agree that if you want some or all of the "premium" features, a one time purchase is the only option. I don't like recurring subscriptions and avoid them when possible. I guess in this case, since you're paying for functionality on their servers it makes sense to pay as you use it. Still, as an end user, I do avoid subscriptions if I can.

Good to know you've got a better option though. Anything that allows you to self-host this stuff (mostly at least) is a positive thing IMO. In my early experiments before moving to the Synology software on my NAS, I had the computer running iSpy save to the Dropbox folder on that computer and limited the archive size to match the capacity of that Dropbox account. That way I could at least access recordings from elsewhere but I never got into email or SMS alerts. Not sure how I'd personally set that up.