Does eufy work without a subscription?

Yes, and eufy states it more plainly than any other maker here. The page making the case is titled "Local Security with No Monthly Fees", and the heading on it reads "Local Security*, No Monthly Fee".

That asterisk is the interesting part. There are three on that one page.

Does eufy work without a subscription?

Yes, and eufy states it more plainly than any other maker here: the page making the case is titled Local Security with No Monthly Fees. Recordings go to a card in the camera or to a HomeBase you own, and the person and pet detection runs on the device rather than in a plan.

That third and fourth row are the ones to notice. eufy says its enhanced AI features are "Provided by HomeBase™ S380 without additional costs" — the same capability Ring puts behind a plan and Blink puts behind a plan.

What do the asterisks on eufy's no-monthly-fee page mean?

Three of them, and each qualifies the claim it is attached to. Cloud features send data to the cloud when you use them; notification thumbnails must be temporarily stored there; and the one-year storage figure assumes a 16 TB drive eufy says is not included.

Three asterisks, and what each one says

• "Local Security*, No Monthly Fee" — "If you choose to use cloud-based features such as Cloud Backup or push notifications with thumbnail previews, videos or thumbnail previews will be sent to the cloud as needed to provide your selected features."
• "Don't pay a single cent more for instant notifications**" — "Push notifications with thumbnail previews require thumbnail preview images to be temporarily stored in the cloud."
• "Up to 1 Year of Local Storage on HomeBase™ S380*" — "When used with a 16 TB storage drive." eufy states elsewhere on the same page that the drive is "not included".

All three footnotes are quoted in full from https://www.eufy.com/eufy-local-security, read 27 August 2026. None of them contradicts the headline. Each one narrows it.

Read them together and the shape is clear. eufy's local claim is real for the recording, which never leaves your house unless you ask it to. It is narrower for the notification, because a picture in an alert has to travel through somebody's server to reach your phone, and eufy says so rather than letting you assume otherwise.

That is a footnote most makers would not have written.

How much does eufy charge for cloud storage?

Basic is $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year and covers one device. Plus is $13.99 a month or $139.99 a year and covers all of them. Both keep 30 days. This site recorded eufy as publishing no prices until 27 August 2026, which was wrong.

The correction is ours, not eufy's. Every URL with the word membership in it returns 404, and that was recorded here as a company that had stopped publishing. The prices were on a page called cloud storage the whole time.

eufy also states a real limit on the cheaper tier: "Repeatedly purchasing the same package will extend service only for the original device, not for additional ones." Two cameras on Basic is not two subscriptions — it is one subscription bought twice for one camera.

How long does a eufy camera keep footage without a plan?

eufy's own comparison says three months of on-device storage, and up to a year on a HomeBase S380 — with an asterisk stating that figure is for a 16 TB drive, which is not included.

The drive is the hidden cost of the no-monthly-fee argument, and an honest one: bought once instead of rented forever. eufy's page says storage "easily expands, up to 16 TB, with the addition of a storage drive (not included)".

Against that, eufy's own table puts the paid cloud alternative at "Up to 180 Days of Cloud Backup" — longer than the 30 days its own Cloud Backup plans actually sell. That column is not describing eufy. It is describing a competitor, which is the next thing worth looking at.

Why does eufy print a rival's price and not its own?

On the local-security page, eufy compares itself to a column headed "Cloud Backup (Brand R)" at "Up to $10 per month". Its own price appears nowhere on that page.

The prices are published, one click away. But the page arguing you need no subscription is also the page quoting a subscription price, and the price it quotes belongs to somebody else.

Set against the field, eufy and Tapo land at the same $3.99, and the difference is what declining costs you. Reolink asks nothing at all for the equivalent, on the cameras that take a card.

What is eufy's Basic Plan and what does it cost?

It is a separate subscription from Cloud Backup, it needs a HomeBase Professional S1, and eufy publishes no price for it at all. The agreement gives six months free, does not auto-renew, and can only be cancelled by email.

The agreement is worth reading before you start the trial, for one clause. Cancelling early does not just stop the service — it takes the extended warranty with it, "as if the extended warranty had never been applied; your product will revert to the original manufacturer warranty period".

Two smaller things. "There is no automatic renewal", which is the opposite of the industry default and in the customer's favour. And to cancel you must "contact eufy Customer Support directly" by email — there is no button.

So should you buy eufy to avoid a subscription?

Yes, if you are willing to buy the storage instead of renting it. That is the trade in one sentence: a HomeBase and a drive cost money once, and they replace the thing every other maker on this list bills you for monthly.

What you give up is the off-site copy. If the risk you are insuring against is somebody taking the camera, local storage is the wrong answer and $3.99 a month is a reasonable price for the right one. If the risk is a delivery going missing, you already have everything you need.

Set against the rest of the field, eufy is the brand whose free tier keeps the most and says the most about what it keeps — asterisks included.

Buying the storage instead of renting it

Specifications as published by each maker, read 27 August 2026. Nothing was tested and nothing is ranked. The HomeBase is first because it is what this page is actually about — it is where the recordings live, and the drive that expands it is bought separately. The Reolink is the other brand here whose detection runs on the camera rather than in a plan.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This costs you nothing and never affects what is covered here.

How this was checked

The Tapo monthly figure in the cross-brand comparison was rechecked on 6 September 2026 against Tapo's US cloud-plan page. It lists $3.49 per month for the entry plan.

The no-monthly-fee claim, all three footnotes, the storage figures and the Brand R comparison were read on 27 August 2026 from https://www.eufy.com/eufy-local-security. The four plan prices are from https://www.eufy.com/cloud-storage, which returns HTTP 200 to a plain request with no sign-in. The trial length, the renewal terms, the cancellation route and the eufyCare+ clause are from the Basic Plan Subscription Agreement, which states its own last-updated date as "[2025-12-25 ]", square brackets and all.

No cameras were tested for this article. The Brand R column is reported as eufy's own framing of a competitor and is not repeated here as a fact about that competitor's terms.

Corrections

This page corrected an error on this site rather than one on eufy's. Until 27 August 2026 the tracker, the roundup and two other posts recorded eufy as a company that publishes no plan prices, on the evidence of URLs we had on file returning 404. All four now carry the real figures. If eufy moves the cloud storage page again, this page gets the new answer and a new date, and the plan prices stay on the tracker.