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The monthly charge seems high to me. They really aren't providing anything you can't do yourself at little or no cost.  

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Monthly charge!?!?  WTF?!

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Hey all,

It's awesome to see this interest in Dropcam. All of your concerns about upload bandwidth consumption for streaming 720p video are very valid. To address that issue, we built Dropcam HD to compress large 720p video using H.264 so that it doesn't adversely affect your Internet performance or hit bandwidth caps. Instead of streaming gigabytes of video at a time over your Wi-Fi, Dropcam HD streams around 200Kbps instead, which is nearly 90% less than most 720p streams.  However,  TAP makes a solid point with Mi-Fi use.  If you're primary router is a mobile hotspot, anything that uploads data regularly just won't work. In this case, Dropcam is no exception.

While the barebones functionality of seeing your video on your computer might be comparable to IP cameras like Foscam, there are quite a few benefits unique to Dropcam over just any other IP camera.
1. Dropcams are infinitely easier to use than regular IP cams.
     -That's because nearly all IP cams have to be setup to stream video over your local home network. Among other things that means customizing each IP camera to send video to a local server in your home via router ports that you'll have to open and forward manually.  If you're not someone who is up to that task, then an easier option like Dropcam HD would be the way to go.

2. Dropcam stores its video in the cloud with AES 256-bit encryption (same security online banks use to protect your account). This is handy for a couple of reasons:
   1 You dont have to be a technical genius to setup your own camera
   2 You're not limited to watching video from just one computer in your home.

3. You can watch your Dropcam video anywhere.
    -Because Dropcam video is stored in the cloud, you can be in your car, out with the family, or at the vacation home and still see what's happening in front of your camera on any computer or your smartphone. Watching your Dropcam video is kind of like checking your email, except your email has bank-level security.

When it comes to the DVR recording service, we try to price it as fairly as possible. On our Plus plan, it's $9.95 per month for the first camera and $4.95 for any additional Plus cameras on the same account. This gets you a 7-day "rolling window" of DVR storage. There are also annual options available that get you 2 months free with pre-payment.

In many cases, our Plus DVR plan is cheaper than storing video yourself. Even an idle PC will cost you about $10 a month on your power bill, and it could be a lot more if the computer is busy storing video. In contrast, a Dropcam HD takes just a few watts, so it will cost you 10-20 cents per month in power costs. This means a Dropcam HD with Plus could very well be less expensive than doing it yourself, and you also get the amazing additional benefits that our cloud DVR provides:

- Offsite storage: We've had many customers let us know that they were able to retrieve their video from our cloud DVR after a burglary, even when the Dropcam itself was disabled or stolen
- Automatic video backups: our DVR recording plans automatically back up your video to multiple servers instead of just storing to a single hard drive (like a typical IP camera setup)
- Maintenance free: Computer decided to stop running? Need to install Windows updates? No problem with Dropcam DVR: your Dropcam runs independently of a computer, and all of the recording is managed in the cloud

There's plenty of additional features too! Video sharing, 2-way audio, night vision. If you're interested, there's more info at https://www.dropcam.com

Hope that addresses some of your concerns. I tried to be as thorough as possible.  Feel free to reply with any other thoughts.

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Hey all,

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60GB per month of bandwidth.  Yikes!

I live in the sticks, and my MiFi I use for internet gets real expensive after the first 5GB.  Alas...