Thank you for at least looking into it, WyzeDave. I have a few things to add for your consideration:
There will definitely be a strong voice of people who will never agree to pay a subscription for RTSP since their feelings are that the entire point of RTSP is to avoid subscriptions. I acknowledge that this puts you in a tough situation where you can’t reasonably afford to pay someone to build and maintain it if it is ONLY a drain on your income and doesn’t have a direct relationship to demonstrate that it pays for itself. thus we get stuck in a cycle of it never getting done.
I’m sure you’ve considered that a lot of the above people may not be a direct source of income, but they are a secondary source in a way. They are often excited to show people what they do with their smart home, and give recommendations, etc and then a percentage of those people will buy your products and some will end up subscribing. In the long run you will end up getting more subscriptions because they end up being free marketing for you. There are a lot of people who leave Wyze and suggest other companies just because you don’t offer RTSP or Home Assistant or HomeKit. So when people ask them for suggestions (Friends, family, forums, home assistant, even other tech sites, etc) they say some other company is the best, and those people trust them even though the new people may not care about RTSP or advanced options they use and RTSP is all that was important to the hobbiest who is giving recommendations. This indirect loss is still a lot of potential lost conversions and possible lost free marketing, especially for a company who primarily relies on “Word of Mouth” for most of their marketing. That being the case, providing RTSP simply fills in that huge gap you have. So I hope you take this into account with your cost analysis, because NOT doing it has also been costing a lot of lost revenue too, and not just in hardware sales, but word of mouth recommendations wherein a percentage of those turn into subscription conversions, even sometimes when they didn’t originally intend to pay a subscription. My parents bought a Wyze cam with no intention of paying a subscription, but they ended up doing it anyway against their initial intentions. How much are those losses costing and could those extra sales compensate for the resource development cost anyway?
I wonder if a third option could be a compromise with something along the lines of using Cam Plus and Cam Plus Pro subscription surplus/profit (even though I know your profit margins are low and reasonable) to INITIALLY fund the resources needed to build it and let people know that RTSP will initially only be allowed to Cam Plus subscribers for a certain period of time for this reason (that they are the only reason it’s possible for you to fund development of it) and that you plan to eventually open it up to everyone else as well when the cost recoupment is reasonable. Early access to features is usually a reasonable and common thing offered to subscribers (albeit rarely for something like RTSP which is nearly always seen as a universal free thing).
Another alternative could be to allow users to pay a one time fee to “unlock” access to it. The argument being that providing RTSP and ongoing firmware updates and bug and security testing, etc does cost money. This may satisfy the anti-subscription crowd that there isn’t a subscription, while covering the costs for development and projected ongoing maintenance that may not have been included or factored into the profit margins/costs of their initial hardware purchase. I would find this reasonable. Maybe a mix of allowing people to choose this option or including it with the subscriptions. Then at some point after you have it mostly developed, you can just include it in the cost of the hardware from the start, even if it’s only in the “Pro” models. You could even allow the option of a one-time lump sum vs the option to breakup that same amount into monthly payments for X amount of months. OR include it to all subscribers.
I will say that I would be willing to pay to have native RTSP that I could run directly to my Home Assistant Instance. Currently I use Docker Wyze Bridge instead, and it’s functional, but not quite as good as an official RTSP implementation, and I’d be willing to pay a reasonable amount to get direct RTSP access without a 3rd party converter. How much is hard to say. 
While all of the above are acceptable to me and I would use them and be very happy and tell tons of people, I will tell you what would make me drop dead EXCITED:
PERSONALLY, if you would go a step further and ALSO include full camera integration into home assistant, including integrating the notifications (how amazing would it be if you allowed descriptive notifications and regular AI detections to be parsed by home assistant and allow us to set our own custom triggers, etc based on all those things? People would be way more likely to pay your subscriptions if all your AI detections and notification text came into Home Assistant too). Also, ingrate all the settings options like camera on/off, floodlight on/off, siren on/off, motion on/off, and many others…several of which are already available for you to copy and paste from the open source 3rd party Wyze API in the Home Assistant Community Store. If you basically integrated the cameras with a direct Home Assistant integration, I would be super excited. Sure some people would use it for free, but if you integrated your AI detectsion to be used as triggers or your descriptive notifications to be parsed, I would totally upgrade to Cam Unlimited Pro to get all those extra benefits and have no regrets and everyone wins since it’s an integration like Google/Alexa where your server isn’t being “polled” like is necessary when you only allow 3rd parties to hack together a workaround (hence why you had to ban motion detection and sensors from the 3rd party solution because it was a polling workaround instead of an official integration like your Google/Alexa partnerships).
Another question I have for you, is what happens if you start developing RTSP and the CSA FINALLY gets around to releasing the Matter Camera libraries and you want to do that and maybe do that instead of RTSP? If you had people PAY to develop RTSP and then you drop it to switch to Matter, you may get some extremely upset people. If you have people pay specifically just for RTSP, you take the risk of what happens in the future when or if you change your mind or can’t keep maintaining it or whatever like happened in the past when you stopped supporting RTSP, only in the past it was free and now you will have had people who PAID for it. That is a fairly high risk, at least socially if not in other ways. For that reason, it would be safer to nest it under something like being funded through Cam Unlimited, etc. Then if you ever drop it or switch, there is less fall-out. An RTSP specific subscription would either need to be a limited time, one time payment or very, very low long-term price that pretty much just covers overall costs plus avg R&D cost over the life cycle.
Overall, I personally lean toward including it in a subscription as early access to reward subscribers to start with until you recoup costs. Make sure to tell anti-subscribers that you promise to live up to your value to “make great tech affordable to all” and will eventually release it to everyone else as well when you feel you have stabilized the costs it took to develop it, and you aren’t permanently paywalling it. Then consider doing the same thing by integrating Home Assistant with a free option (maybe just getting camera streams and a few settings that don’t cost anything) as well as extra subscriber entities that make it worth it to have the subscription like AI detection triggers, notification parsing, and more. Then you’ll get more people to love the bonuses from subscriptions and keep paying them too. I would.
Those are my initial thoughts. I may have more later.
For sure!
@cyberdog_17 beat me to half the stuff I was in the middle of writing because I talk too much, but I obviously support basically everything he said.
Yes, this is the main struggle. This is why I suggest doing a compromise with either “Early Access” for subscribers or a one-time/limited payment that covers the cost that wasn’t initially priced into the hardware, and then you can “Price it in” to future sales/models. People would still be upset about that, but it does address a fair rationale why. I think the amount has to be a really low amount though.
This is what I would lean toward to start with. Entry level cameras should probably be kept as affordable as possible. However, maybe once it’s built for one model securely and stability, it’s easy to port to the rest like a copy and paste, so if it’s not much effort, why not include it on almost all of them? Maybe that’s not the case, just considering reasons it might be better for all instead of just Pro.
This might be the way to go…just do it for new Pro models like you were saying and price it in from now on.