Open source video analytics and the cost nobody prices in

Frigate is very good software. ZoneMinder has been keeping cameras honest since before most of this category existed. Neither is a compromise choice, and if this page tried to tell you otherwise you would rightly stop reading, because you can go and look at both this afternoon.

What this page is about is the total, because a licence of zero is only one line of it, and the other three lines are the ones that decide whether self hosting is actually the cheapest thing you can do.

What is genuinely good about the open source options

Frigate does real object detection on live RTSP streams, with zones, masks and object filters that are more precise than most commercial products expose. It integrates properly with Home Assistant, it keeps its own clips and snapshots, and it detects continuously on a live feed, which is something this product does not do today. Its configuration is a YAML file, which sounds like a complaint and is in fact a feature: your entire detection policy is a text file you can put in version control.

ZoneMinder is older, broader and less opinionated. It will speak to almost any camera ever made, including analogue capture cards, and it has an event model and a permissions system that predate the entire cloud video market.

Both are free of licence cost and both keep every frame on hardware you control, which for some organisations settles the question before anything else is discussed.

The hardware line

Object detection is arithmetic on every frame you decide to look at, and that arithmetic has to happen somewhere.

• A machine that stays on. A small form factor PC or a mini server, running around the clock. If you already have one, this line is zero, and if you do not, it is the largest single number here.
• An accelerator. A Coral TPU, or a GPU that the detector supports. CPU only inference works for one or two cameras and then degrades, and the way it degrades is by dropping frames, which means missing the short events you cared about.
• Storage. Continuous recording eats disk in a way that surprises people the first time. Retention policy is a disk purchase.
• Power, around the clock, for years. Small, but it is not nothing, and it is the one line that grows with the electricity price rather than with your camera count.

None of these are objections. They are simply the parts of the bill that a comparison against a subscription usually forgets, and any honest comparison has to put them in the same column.

The hours line, which is the real one

Setup is the small part and it is the part everybody estimates. A weekend gets you cameras connected, detection running and zones drawn. That is genuinely satisfying work and if you enjoy it, it is not a cost at all.

The line that matters is the maintenance, because it never ends:

• Updates to the detector, the container runtime and the host operating system, each of which can break the other two.
• The camera whose stream URL changed after a firmware update, which will be discovered the week after it happens.
• Disks filling, disks failing, and the backup nobody tested.
• Certificates expiring on the remote access path.
• Retuning after seasons change, because the tree that was bare in February is a wall of movement in June.

Put a number on your own hour, multiply by the hours you honestly expect per month, and add twelve months of it to the hardware. That is the comparison figure. For a homelab enthusiast whose hobby this is, the number is genuinely near zero and self hosting wins outright. For a facilities manager whose hours have a rate attached and whose actual job is elsewhere, the number is usually larger than any subscription in this market.

The compliance gap

This is the part that decides mid market purchases and almost never appears in a self hosting comparison, because the people writing them are not the people who have to answer the questionnaire.

A self hosted detector on a box in a cupboard typically has no single sign on, no role separation beyond an administrator password, no audit trail of who viewed which clip, no stated retention policy you can hand to counsel, no data processing agreement and no sub processor list. Those are not features an IT lead wants, they are the artefacts that let them approve the deployment at all.

If nobody is going to ask you for any of that, this section costs you nothing and you should ignore it. If your organisation has a security review process, price the work of satisfying it yourself, because that work is real and it lands on somebody. What the answers look like when a vendor supplies them is on the enterprise security camera systems page.

The arithmetic at 4, 15 and 40 cameras

Fill in your own numbers. The point is the shape, not our totals.

Scroll the table sideways to read every column. On a phone it is stacked one scale at a time instead.

Notice what changes across the rows. The hardware grows slowly, the hours grow faster, and the compliance work appears all at once the first time somebody in procurement asks a question. Our own prices are on the pricing page so you can put them straight into your own version of this table.

When self hosting is the right answer

• You enjoy it. This is a real reason and it beats every spreadsheet.
• Policy or law requires that footage never leaves the building, and the exception process is worse than running a server.
• You need continuous detection on a live stream today, which Frigate does and this build does not.
• Camera count is small, and the person maintaining it is the person benefiting from it.

When it is the expensive answer wearing a free hat

• The maintainer is one person, and the site stops working properly when that person is on holiday.
• Somebody is going to send you a security questionnaire, and answering it is a project.
• The hours belong to a facilities manager whose real job is not this.
• You have already tried it, it works, and quietly nobody has updated it in eleven months.

If you land on the second list, the alternative is not an enterprise platform and a hardware refresh. It is software on the cameras you already own, which is exactly what this is, at a price you can read without talking to anyone. And if you land on the first list, run Frigate, and take the false trigger physics with you, because it applies identically no matter whose software is doing the detecting.