I think it’s a bit disingenuous to frame this as you “giving person detection” when you are in fact taking away 12 second cloud storage, a major selling point to your cameras and forcing users to opt in and get a hard sale to pay for to get it back. This is an extra bitter pill to swallow because the first cameras I bought from you guys also came with person detection and again, you took that away and wanted me to again, opt back in and get a sales pitch to contribute. What is this, a charity?
I get it, cloud storage costs you guys money, but that was your business model! I didn’t pick it, you guys did If I wanted to pay a subscription, I would have gone with Ring or Nest. I’m sorry, their products may cost more (although they have come down a lot in the last year), but they are established and work. I chose you because I don’t want to pay for a subscription and I like local storage and am ok with tinkering. Now I’m not sure if it’s safe to buy anymore cameras if they won’t come with cloud storage without paying.
If I may make a couple of suggestions, your SD card reader has just been terrible. I’m glad it’s getting an update but I don’t think it’s enough. It’s impossible to find anything on there without using the cloud storage as a rough guide. Also, people you share a camera with don’t have access to it and we can’t share an account so this will essentially leave all the shared users in the dark. All they get is a live view now. That is a deal-breaker for families where the primary holder shares the account with the rest of the family. At least with 12 seconds, it was something.
I really hope that instead of keep bringing new features, you work on existing ones. If you fix the SD card problems, then not having cloud recording will be a viable solution.