I’ll say this for the smart camera market, it’s gotten very good at making you pay twice. You buy the camera, then you get nagged into a monthly fee just to see more than a blurry ten second clip of your own front door. Ring does it, Nest does it, most of them do it. So when a company launches a camera that works properly without a subscription, it gets my attention
Launching at IFA Berlin 2026 is the Shelly Camera, accounced today by Bulgarian smart home firm Shelly Group. It’s a compact indoor camera with Full HD 1080p video, a wide 110 by 70 degree field of view and black and white night vision, aimed at homes, apartments and small businesses. It’ll cost €39.90 in Ireland and it’s set to go on sale soon through Shelly.com and its usual reseller network. It’s also the brand’s first proper camera in years, following on from the old Shelly Eye, so there’s a bit of previous form here rather than a company chancing its arm in a new category.
The subscription bit
You get three ways to use it. Watch the live feed with nothing recorded, pop in a microSD card (not included) for local storage, or pay for Shelly Cloud if you want footage backed up off site. None of those require an ongoing subscription to function, which is the point. Buy the camera, own the camera, use the camera. Shelly does throw in three months of Cloud free so you can try the extras, namely AI object detection that tells people, pets and cars apart, before deciding whether it’s worth paying for afterwards.
It plugs into the rest of your smart home, not just an app
The more interesting bit for anyone already knee deep in smart home gear is that this isn’t a standalone camera bolted onto an app. Motion detection can trigger other Shelly devices directly, switching on a light, firing a relay, kicking off whatever automation you’ve set up, and it does this locally without needing the cloud involved at all. Movement at the front door turning on the hall light before you’ve even got your key out is the kind of thing that’s normally locked behind a subscription tier elsewhere.
It also plays nicely outside the Shelly ecosystem, which matters if you’re the sort who doesn’t like being boxed into one brand. It supports MQTT, WebSocket and WebRTC, and works with Home Assistant (my homelab is already worried), Frigate NVR, Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Samsung SmartThings. For the self hosted crowd, that’s arguably the bigger story than the camera itself.
Where it falls short
I won’t pretend 1080p is exciting in 2026. Rivals like Wyze have had 2K cameras on shelves for less money, so Shelly is behind on raw resolution even if the field of view and night vision hold their own. There’s also a built in microphone and speaker for two way audio, handy for shouting at a delivery driver or checking in on a pet, and it’s powered over USB-C with a two metre cable and mounting plate in the box, so at least there’s no proprietary charging faff to deal with.
Shelly Camera is available in black or white with a two year warranty, and is listed now on the Shelly site ahead of wider stock landing soon.
