Plenty of smart home kit is easy to buy and quietly expensive to keep. The camera, the doorbell or the alarm costs one price on the box, then the app asks for a plan before it will keep a recording, tell a person from a cat or let anyone know something has happened. Put 2 or 3 of those together and the house has a running cost nobody planned for.
A home with no monthly fee is possible, and there is no trick to it. It comes down to one decision: where the brains of the house live.
Where the monthly fees usually hide
Camera recordings. Many subscription cameras keep their clips in the maker's cloud and charge to keep them, sometimes per camera. Without the plan there is often no history at all.
Alarm monitoring. A call centre watching your sensors is a service with staff, so it comes with a contract.
The clever features. Spotting people, a longer history or extra users are often kept behind a premium tier.
Heating extras. Some heating apps keep their cleverer features behind a monthly plan too.
Anything that runs in a company's cloud. Even when it is free today, someone pays for the servers, and that cost has to land somewhere.
None of these fees is a con. Each one pays for a server, a team or a call centre. The point is simpler: if the work happens in someone else's building, you pay rent on it.
What £0 a month actually takes
For there to be nothing to pay each month, the work has to happen in your house. In the homes we fit, that is a hub: a compact computer with 4 cores and 16 GB of memory that sits beside your router, with room for up to 1 TB of recordings. Everything that usually comes with a plan runs on it.
Every camera records to the hub, around the clock or only when something happens, and knows a person from a car or a cat.
The alarm runs there too: Home, Night and Away, the sirens, and alerts to the family's phones and up to 12 more people you choose.
The heating plan, the automations, the scenes and the voice assistant all live on the hub, so none of them needs an account with anyone.
Because the hub is yours, there is nothing to renew. The recordings stay in the house. What goes out is the alerts you set up: the family's phones are told in our app, and your outside contacts get the words, then the pictures and the video if you switch those on for them.
What you will still pay for
£0 a month is the honest headline, but it is not the same as free for ever. This is what is left:
A little electricity for the hub, and the broadband you already have.
Batteries for the wireless sensors every so often. The app shows every battery's level, with a warning on screen before one runs out.
A battery backup, only if you want the hub and the router to keep going through a power cut. It is an optional add-on, around £100, paid once.
Your own music service, if you already pay for one. The house can play it once you sign in; we add nothing on top.
Anything new you decide to add later, priced once, the same way as the first time.
There are also things you give up, and it is better to know them now. Nobody in a call centre watches the house: you and your people are told instead. Watching the cameras live while you are out is not part of the system; when something happens, the alert finds your phone wherever you are. If either of those is a must, say so before you buy anything from anyone.
5 questions that test any no-fee promise
1What stops working if the payments stop? If the answer is the recordings or the alerts, there is a fee, whatever the advert says.
2Where are the recordings kept? "On a drive in your house" is the answer you want.
3Is every login handed over, the hub's included? If only the installer can get in, you are renting your own house back.
4What happens if the company stops trading? A home that runs on its own hub keeps working, and with the logins any competent installer can look after it.
5Is anything free only for the first year? Trial periods are where a lot of monthly fees begin.
What it costs
You pay once, for the kit and the fitting, and the price is fixed in writing before anything is fitted. It mostly depends on the number of cameras, the size of the house and whether the heating joins in. Message us on WhatsApp with what you have and what you want; a short chat or a few photos is usually enough for a fixed price. After that, £0 a month.