Your cameras keep recording when the internet does not
Cloud camera services charge monthly to store your footage on someone else’s disk, and stop working the moment the line drops. Rutba Vision runs on a box in your building. The only thing that talks to us is a licence check.
· 3 min read
The cloud camera pitch is good: no box to maintain, footage safe off-site, view it from anywhere. The parts left out are that you pay monthly per camera to store your own footage, that the retention window is a pricing tier rather than a technical limit, and that when the internet goes down the cameras stop recording — which is disproportionately often the moment the footage would have mattered.
It runs on a box in your building
Rutba Vision is a network video recorder for standard IP cameras, running entirely on your own hardware. Recording continues through an outage. Footage never leaves the site. The disks are yours and so is what is on them.
- Records any standard IP camera — no proprietary hardware to buy.
- Hardware-accelerated encoding and detection.
- Runs fully on-premise; footage never leaves your site.
- Keeps recording during an internet outage.
- CLI management and remote administration.
- Per-site and per-camera licensing.
The one thing that talks to us
A licence check, and it tolerates being offline. That last clause is the one that matters: a licence check which fails closed when the line drops would reintroduce the exact failure this design exists to remove — and would do it silently, on the night it counted.
A licence check that stops your recorder during an outage has moved the cloud dependency rather than removed it.
What you take on
That trade is worth being explicit about because it inverts the usual one. Everywhere else in this catalogue we run the infrastructure. Here you do, and the reason is that surveillance footage is the category of data where "somewhere else" is least acceptable and most expensive.
The businesses this is actually for
Retail sites and warehouses with cameras already installed. Businesses that cannot send footage off-site for policy reasons — which is more organisations than the cloud vendors’ marketing implies, once a data protection officer has read the sub-processor list. And anyone tired of per-camera cloud recording fees on footage nobody will ever watch.
| Plan | Price | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Single Site | $99 / site / month | One location, up to 8 cameras. |
| Multi-Site | $249 / month | Up to 5 sites, centrally licensed. |
| Enterprise | Custom | Large estates. Perpetual licensing available. |
Perpetual licensing is on that list on purpose. A recorder is infrastructure with a ten-year life, and a business buying one is entitled to ask what happens if we stop selling it.