Free cloud storage for security and IP cameras: brands, limits, costs

If you bought a security camera in 2019 on the promise of free cloud storage, there is a reasonable chance the offer no longer exists. Amazon shut down Cloud Cam entirely in December 2022 and deleted every customer's video history on the way out. Arlo stopped including free storage on new camera models back in 2018. Wyze, which had the most generous free plan of anyone, closed it to new users.

Despite that, free cloud storage does still exist. It is narrower than it looks, and the word free covers three different arrangements that get treated as one: storage that costs nothing indefinitely, storage that lives on the camera or a hub instead of the cloud, and storage that is free until a trial expires. The difference matters because it decides what footage you have when you need to prove something happened.

Which security cameras have free cloud storage? #

Cameras and IP cameras with free cloud storage #

Two brands still put footage in the cloud at no cost, and both of them attach conditions that the roundups tend to leave out.

Google Nest, three hours of free event video history #

Google gives you up to three hours of event video history without a subscription, but only on the Nest Cam (battery) and the Nest Doorbell (battery). Buy the Nest Cam Indoor (wired, 3rd gen), the Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen) or the Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) and that extends to six hours. Most older Nest cameras and doorbells give you nothing at all in the way of recorded history unless you pay.

Read Google's own documentation closely and the free tier is described as event video previews and photo snapshots of detected activity rather than full clips, so treat any article promising three hours of video as approximate. Three hours is also rolling, which means an incident at midnight has usually been overwritten by the time you look at breakfast.

Wyze, free cloud clips on older cameras only #

Wyze built its reputation on giving away what everyone else charged for. Cam Plus Lite lets you name your own price, including nothing at all, for twelve-second event clips saved in the cloud for fourteen days with a five-minute gap between recordings.

Wyze now lists Cam Plus Lite as a legacy service that is no longer available to new users and cannot be assigned to new devices. It only runs on cameras released before April 2022, and nothing currently on sale falls inside that window. If you own an older Wyze camera and never cancelled, you still have your twelve-second clips.

Buy a Wyze camera today and the free tier gives you still photographs rather than video. Motion triggers a snapshot, the snapshot is held for fourteen days, and the same five-minute cooldown applies, so a snapshot tells you somebody was at the door without showing you what they did. Whether that counts as free cloud storage depends on how literally you read the phrase.

Local recording to a microSD card still costs nothing on any Wyze camera, which is covered further down and is the better option regardless.

Canary, 24 hours of video history #

Canary keeps a rolling 24 hours of event history at no cost across as many as four cameras on one account, which makes it the most generous free tier here by volume if not by duration.

The catch sits in the features rather than the storage. Two-way talk, person detection, desktop streaming and location-based mode switching all sit behind Canary Premium at $9.99 a month, so the free tier gives you recordings you can watch and very little you can act on. A camera that tells you somebody is in the room without letting you speak to them is doing half the job you probably bought it for.

Free local storage instead of free cloud storage #

When you search for free cloud storage, there is a good chance what you actually want is no monthly bill. Local storage answers that better than any free cloud tier currently does, because the footage sits on a card or a hub you own and nobody can withdraw it in a product update.

At IFA in Berlin this September, Reolink, eufy and aosu all launched cameras built around on-device processing and local storage rather than a subscription tier, so this is where the consumer end of the market is heading.

eufy, local storage on the HomeBase hub #

eufy, owned by Anker, runs its cameras through the HomeBase 3, which stores footage indoors and expands to as much as 16TB if you add a drive. Detection happens on the device, including facial recognition that learns the people who live in your house, so you are not paying a monthly fee for the analytics either. eufy sells optional cloud backup, but you can ignore it and lose nothing essential.

Reolink, cards, NVRs and 24/7 recording without a subscription #

Reolink is the closest thing on the consumer market to a professional setup. Footage goes to a microSD card, a Reolink NVR, a NAS or an FTP server, whichever suits you, and the wired PoE models record continuously rather than in motion-triggered fragments. That distinction matters more than people expect, because motion clips only capture what the camera decided was worth capturing.

Tapo, hub storage on a budget #

TP-Link's Tapo line is the cheapest way into local storage. The H200 hub takes cards up to 512GB and doubles as a chime if you are running a doorbell, and individual cameras like the C120 undercut almost everything else at their resolution.

Blink and Wyze, what still works without a plan #

Blink cameras record locally through a compatible Sync Module, which is the only free storage option once the trial expires. Wyze cameras take a microSD card and will record continuously to it with no subscription and no cooldown, which is a better deal than the twelve-second cloud clips ever were.

WiFi cameras with free storage, what to check first #

Before you buy a wireless camera on the strength of free local storage, check where the storage physically sits. A card inside an outdoor camera leaves with the camera if somebody takes it off the wall, so a system that writes to a hub indoors gives you evidence that survives the theft it recorded. Check too whether the camera keeps recording when the internet drops, since a wireless camera that depends on a cloud connection to write anything is not really storing locally at all.

Security cameras with free cloud storage trials #

A trial is not a storage plan, though a lot of packaging blurs the two.

Ring, thirty days free and nothing after that #

Ring includes a 30-day trial and has no permanent free storage tier of any kind. Once it ends, you subscribe or you keep no video history, and the paid plans hold motion events in the cloud for up to 180 days depending on your settings. Ring's cameras have no card slot, so there is no local fallback either.

Blink, and what the trial actually ends #

Blink's 30-day Plus trial covers every device on your account. Blink's own support documentation is unusually direct about what follows, stating that once the trial ends no new recordings will be saved to the cloud and existing cloud recordings will be deleted according to your app settings.

That sentence is the clearest description of what free cloud storage usually means, so it is worth carrying with you when you read any other list.

How much does cloud storage for security cameras cost? #

Consumer plans are priced per camera or per account, and the gap between those two models is where the money goes. A single camera on a basic plan is cheap enough to ignore. Four cameras on four separate per-camera plans stop being cheap quickly, which is why most vendors now sell an all-cameras tier that gets attractive somewhere around the third device.

What you are paying for is usually three things at once, and they are worth separating. Retention is how far back you can look. Clip behaviour is whether the camera records the whole event or a capped fragment with a cooldown after it. Detection is whether the system tells you a person appeared or just that something moved.

For CCTV and IP camera setups the arithmetic is different, because you are often deciding between paying monthly for cloud retention and buying an NVR once. A recorder costs more upfront and nothing after, though it gives you nothing if somebody takes it, so plenty of installations end up running both and treating the cloud copy as insurance rather than primary storage. If you are weighing that decision across a whole site, the economics of video surveillance as a service are worth understanding before you commit either way.

Business cameras with cloud storage included in the license #

Everything above is built for houses, and the limits show as soon as you point the same cameras at premises. Three hours of rolling history is fine for checking whether a parcel arrived. It is useless when your insurer asks what happened at the loading bay eleven days ago, or when an auditor wants footage matched to an access record.

Commercial systems answer the same complaint from a different direction. Rather than metering storage, they put it on the camera and fold it into the license, so retention is a hardware specification rather than a line on a monthly invoice.

Verkada, 30 days of cloud backup with the license #

Every Verkada camera license includes 30 days of cloud backup, dropping to 15 days on the CD31 and CD31-E. Extended retention is sold per camera in 30-day packs that stack. By default footage stays on the camera and only reaches the cloud if you enable backup, which also means the camera keeps recording through an outage and syncs afterwards.

Cisco Meraki MV, onboard storage with no NVR #

Every MV camera except the MV2 ships with integrated solid-state storage holding up to 60 days depending on how you set retention, which removes the recorder from the architecture entirely. Cloud Archive is a separate license sold in 7, 30, 90, 180 and 365-day increments, so you buy off-site copies only for the cameras where a regulator or an insurer requires them.

Rhombus, edge storage with optional archiving #

Rhombus cameras carry between 20 and 180 days of onboard storage depending on the model and how much movement sits in frame, and the license covers cloud management along with that on-camera storage. Cloud archiving is optional and priced separately, and Rhombus is clear about how it behaves: on a 30-day license, day 31 overwrites day one.

VORTEX by VIVOTEK, continuous recording at the edge #

VORTEX cameras record continuously to an onboard microSD card, so footage survives an internet outage or a power interruption rather than disappearing into the gap. Cloud backup is optional and licensed separately per camera, with retention running from 30 days up to 180, which lets you keep long cloud retention on the doors that matter and run the rest on the card alone.

Pairing camera storage with access control #

Storage only matters when you can find the moment you need, and searching footage by timestamp is slow when you do not know the timestamp. Pairing cameras with your access control system solves that, because every unlock, denied attempt, forced door and tailgating event becomes an index into the video. Kisi's video surveillance integration puts live feeds and event-matched footage in the same dashboard as the door logs, and works across several camera platforms so you can keep the cameras you already own.

If you are specifying a system rather than replacing a home camera, the differences between business security camera systems and consumer hardware go well beyond storage, and the various types of CCTV cameras suit different sites in ways that affect how much footage you generate in the first place.

Frequently asked questions #

Can I get free cloud storage for a CCTV camera? #

Rarely, and not from the major CCTV brands. Traditional CCTV and IP camera systems record to an NVR or a card rather than the cloud, and cloud retention is sold as a subscription on top. The exceptions are commercial platforms like Verkada, where a fixed cloud backup window comes bundled into the camera license rather than billed separately.

How do I get free cloud storage for an IP camera? #

Check whether your camera's manufacturer runs a free tier, because a handful still do and most no longer do. If yours does not, a microSD card or an NVR gives you unlimited retention for a one-off cost, which works out cheaper than any cloud plan over the life of the camera.

Do security cameras require a cloud subscription? #

No. Reolink, eufy, Tapo and Wyze all record locally with no plan at all. Ring requires a subscription for any video history because its cameras have no local storage option, and Blink requires either a plan or a Sync Module.

What is the cheapest cloud storage for security cameras? #

Free tiers from Google Nest and legacy Wyze cameras cost nothing but hold very little. Beyond that, the cheapest option per camera is usually an all-devices plan rather than individual per-camera subscriptions, which becomes the better deal once you run three or more cameras.

Cloud storage or local storage for security cameras, which is better? #

Local storage costs less and keeps working when the internet drops, but it goes missing with the hardware. Cloud storage survives theft and fire, and costs money every month for as long as the camera runs. Commercial systems mostly record to the camera and back up selectively to the cloud, which is the arrangement worth copying if you have the choice.

Which PoE cameras work with cloud platforms without a per-camera storage fee? #

Cisco Meraki MV and Rhombus both include onboard storage in the camera license with cloud archiving as a separate purchase, so you can run either without paying a recurring storage fee. Both integrate with access control platforms, which is worth checking before you specify, since video management software varies widely in what it will connect to.