What Is Frigate NVR and Why It Blows Ring Out of the Water

Let’s get straight to it. If you’re paying Ring a monthly fee to watch blurry clips of your own front porch, you’re getting played. There’s a better way, and it’s called Frigate NVR.

Frigate is an open-source network video recorder built to run on Home Assistant — the same local smart home platform we install in every home we touch. It records your security cameras 24/7, stores everything locally on your own hardware, and uses real-time AI object detection to tell the difference between a person walking up your driveway and a cat knocking over your trash can.

No subscriptions. No cloud. No sending your footage to Amazon’s servers. Just a security system that actually works the way it should.

How Frigate Actually Works

At its core, Frigate is software that connects to your IP security cameras over your local network. It ingests the video streams via RTSP (a standard protocol that virtually all professional-grade cameras support), processes them in real time, and records everything to local storage.

But the real magic is in the AI detection layer.

Frigate uses a Google Coral TPU — a dedicated AI accelerator chip — to run object detection models directly on your hardware. This isn’t some vague “motion detection” that trips every time a tree branch sways. The Coral TPU runs a trained machine learning model that identifies specific objects: people, vehicles, dogs, cats, and more. It does this in real time, at roughly 100+ inferences per second, with almost zero CPU overhead.

That means your system can send you a notification that says “Person detected in driveway” instead of “Motion detected” followed by a 30-second clip of absolutely nothing.

The Hardware Behind It

Here’s what a typical Frigate setup looks like in the homes we build out:

• Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) or a mini PC — this is the brain that runs Home Assistant and Frigate
• Google Coral TPU M.2 or USB — the AI accelerator that handles object detection without breaking a sweat
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) — a Synology or similar device where all your recorded footage lives, with redundant drives so nothing gets lost
• PoE IP cameras — professional-grade cameras (Reolink, Amcrest, Hikvision) that connect over a single ethernet cable for both power and data

The total hardware cost is a one-time investment. No monthly fees. No annual renewals. You own every piece of it, and every byte of footage stays on your property.

Now Let’s Talk About Ring

Ring is Amazon’s consumer security camera line, and it has become wildly popular for one reason: it’s easy. You stick a camera on your door, download an app, and you’re rolling. Fair enough.

But here’s what Ring doesn’t advertise in those cheerful commercials:

You don’t own your video. Every clip your Ring camera records gets uploaded to Amazon’s cloud servers. You’re trusting one of the world’s largest data companies with 24/7 footage of your home, your family, your comings and goings. Amazon has handed Ring footage to law enforcement without user consent in the past. That’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s documented.

You’re paying rent on your own security. Ring Protect Basic costs $40/year per camera. Ring Protect Plus costs $200/year and covers all cameras plus the alarm system. Without a subscription, your Ring cameras can’t even save video clips. You bought the hardware and you still can’t use it fully without paying Amazon every single year.

It doesn’t work without internet. If your internet goes down — or worse, if someone cuts your internet before breaking in — your Ring cameras are paperweights. They can’t record locally. They can’t detect anything. They just sit there.

The AI is basic at best. Ring’s “smart alerts” for people and packages are cloud-dependent and often delayed. They’re nowhere near the accuracy and speed of a local Coral TPU running real-time inference.

Frigate vs. Ring: The Breakdown

Let’s lay it out side by side.

Feature	Frigate NVR	Ring
Monthly/Annual Fee	$0	$40-$200/year
Video Storage	Local NAS (unlimited)	Amazon cloud (limited)
AI Object Detection	Real-time, on-device via Coral TPU	Cloud-based, delayed
Works Without Internet	Yes	No
Camera Limit	Unlimited	Depends on plan
Data Privacy	All data stays local	Sent to Amazon servers
Camera Quality	Professional PoE cameras (4K capable)	Consumer-grade Wi-Fi cameras
Hardware Lifespan	7-10+ years	2-3 years (battery degradation)
Integration	Full Home Assistant ecosystem	Limited Amazon ecosystem

It’s not even close.

What Real-Time AI Detection Looks Like in Practice

Here’s a scenario. It’s 2 AM. Something moves in your backyard. A Ring camera sees “motion” and sends you a notification — maybe. You open the app, wait for it to load a cloud-stored clip, and see… a raccoon.

Now here’s the same scenario with Frigate. The camera captures the movement. The Coral TPU processes the frame in milliseconds and classifies it as “animal.” Your automation rules say you don’t care about animals in the backyard at night. No notification. You sleep through it.

But if that object had been classified as “person”? Your phone buzzes immediately. Your backyard floodlights snap on via a smart switch. Home Assistant triggers a recording at full resolution on all nearby cameras. An alert goes to your phone with a snapshot of the detected person, a bounding box around them, and a link to the live feed. All of this happens in under two seconds, entirely on your local network.

That’s the difference between consumer-grade security theater and an actual security system.

Why Frigate Supports Unlimited Cameras

Ring charges per camera on their basic plan for a reason — they’re paying for cloud storage and processing for each one. More cameras means more cost for them, which means more cost for you.

Frigate runs on your hardware. Adding a fifth, sixth, or tenth camera is just a matter of plugging it into your network switch and adding a few lines of configuration. The Coral TPU can handle detection across dozens of camera streams simultaneously. Your NAS stores the footage. There’s no per-camera fee because there’s no cloud middleman taking a cut.

We routinely install systems with 6-8 cameras for residential homes, and the system handles it effortlessly.

So Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Frigate?

Because it’s not plug-and-play. Setting up Frigate requires configuring Home Assistant, setting up camera streams, tuning detection zones, configuring the Coral TPU, and managing storage. It’s powerful, but it’s technical.

That’s where we come in.

Secure Smart Homes handles the entire setup for you. We install the hardware, configure Frigate with your specific camera layout, tune the detection zones for your property, set up your NAS storage, and build the automations that make the system actually useful. You get a professional-grade AI security system without needing to touch a terminal or write a single line of YAML.

Check out our security camera packages to see what a fully configured Frigate system looks like, or browse our all-in-one smart home packages that include cameras, sensors, automation, and everything else — installed and configured, zero subscriptions, forever.

The Bottom Line

Ring is training wheels. It’s fine if you want a doorbell that dings your phone when the Amazon driver shows up. But if you want actual security — real AI detection, local storage, no subscriptions, no cloud dependency, and a system that works even when your internet doesn’t — Frigate NVR is the answer.

And you don’t have to build it yourself. That’s literally what we do.