I use Amcrest, mostly because the guy who makes frigate recommended them, and has affiliate links on his site. As a software developer myself, I have to say frigate (and HA) are two jewels of open source software and so I’m happy to support them however I can.

That being said, the cameras work well and are easy to integrate with both frigate and HA. They all try to phone home at first, but stop if you tell them to (I’ve confirmed this by monitoring the traffic on my dns servers).

I couldn’t find a privacy friendly wifi camera with a big enough battery to run continuously, so I ended up building my own with a solar panel, an inverter, and a 9ah lithium battery that sits on a fence post at the end of my driveway. It was a fun project, but I wish I could buy it.

Another small gripe is that the PTZ cameras from Amcrest all seem to be crazy expensive or have mixed reviews, so I’ve just held off on those for now.