Sorry for the late reply.  I never used any of the &quot;pro&quot; options so I guess it never came up for me.  It&#x27;s like Plex in that regard, at least how I personally use it.  I just use iSpy as a free, flexible program I can run on an old computer, attach it to the same LAN as the IP cameras, and set it up for motion detection, recording, and storage&#x2F;archive.<p>I definitely agree that if you want some or all of the &quot;premium&quot; features, a one time purchase is the only option.  I don&#x27;t like recurring subscriptions and avoid them when possible.  I guess in this case, since you&#x27;re paying for functionality on their servers it makes sense to pay as you use it.  Still, as an end user, I do avoid subscriptions if I can.<p>Good to know you&#x27;ve got a better option though.  Anything that allows you to self-host this stuff (mostly at least) is a positive thing IMO.  In my early experiments before moving to the Synology software on my NAS, I had the computer running iSpy save to the Dropbox folder on that computer and limited the archive size to match the capacity of that Dropbox account.  That way I could at least access recordings from elsewhere but I never got into email or SMS alerts.  Not sure how I&#x27;d personally set that up.