It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell

It's video surveillance, it makes it more likely they'll go elsewhere. That's literally the whole point of Ring.

I used to have local teenagers messing around on my property and it completely stopped after putting up some lights and cameras. It stops most casual crime.

There are plenty of devices that support a lot of integrations.

However, those companies don’t make the kind of perpetual revenue that bring in capital, and the companies that make the devices that don’t make you pay for their service end up not lasting as long as those that do.

Sadly, it seems that the prudent business decision is to lock your customers into your ecosystem.

Not exactly home gamer stuff, but there are devices like the Axis cameras which can push to a configured mqtt.

Generally ONVIF is the protocol one should be looking for in a camera, it indicates that the edge device can play ball with a central server (Frigate, Blue Iris, etc). Profile M specifies the metadata into external mqtt:

https://www.onvif.org/profiles/profile-m/

I have a similar problem, except I needed to ring the actual doorbell. Currently I'm using a HomeKit-compatible video doorbell that communicates over proprietary radio to its wifi gateway that triggers a HomeKit automation (which presumably runs on my Apple TV as the hub) to turn a Shelly relay on for one second to do the same thing as pressing the doorbell button. I think this all ends up just using my internal network, but who knows. Thank goodness the Shelly relay can get a wifi signal while stuffed into that electrical box in the basement ceiling.

(The actual doorbell button is still there too, so it's a crapshoot which one somebody decides to use in the first place. And yes, many video doorbells have a "chime adapter" to take care of this, but our house's doorbell wiring made them run in fear.)

We have a Ring doorbell that hooks into the actual chime that the old doorbell used, so it still preserves the old doorbell's functionality[1]. I can understand not wanting to buy into the Ring ecosystem (we started using them before they were bought by Amazon), but maybe there are cheaper doorbells that also do that? All we had to do to make the old chime work with the Ring doorbell was install an extra widget that came with the Ring doorbell inside the chime; the Ring doorbell's instructions explained how to do it. It just needed a screwdriver and a few minutes' work.

[1] More precisely, we did until we moved to a manufactured home that did not even have a doorbell installed, after which I had to do some jiggering (now we have a Ring chime that the doorbell can talk to over the house's LAN). But the setup I describe above worked fine for a number of years in the house we were in before.

I'll have to check the latency of my 'smart' doorbell now. I have occasionally heard the doorbell, taken the obligatory time to find the key to unlock the door to find that it was just a package delivery, but enough time had passed that the courier was nowhere to be seen.

(Yours wasn't a latency issue though, what kind of latency do you get with your 5-cloud services chain?)

Also, interesting about the SmartThings API access moving to a subscription model: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/28/samsungs-smartthings-api-ter... (this link is in the article - the cost is only for third party usage, not if you're directly using the SmartThings app).

> the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing

Imagine paying a Korean company five bucks a months so you can get a notification on your phone that your fridge needs a new water filter.

People really need to touch grass.