We have a Ring doorbell that hooks into the actual chime that the old doorbell used, so it still preserves the old doorbell's functionality[1]. I can understand not wanting to buy into the Ring ecosystem (we started using them before they were bought by Amazon), but maybe there are cheaper doorbells that also do that? All we had to do to make the old chime work with the Ring doorbell was install an extra widget that came with the Ring doorbell inside the chime; the Ring doorbell's instructions explained how to do it. It just needed a screwdriver and a few minutes' work.

[1] More precisely, we did until we moved to a manufactured home that did not even have a doorbell installed, after which I had to do some jiggering (now we have a Ring chime that the doorbell can talk to over the house's LAN). But the setup I describe above worked fine for a number of years in the house we were in before.

I'll have to check the latency of my 'smart' doorbell now. I have occasionally heard the doorbell, taken the obligatory time to find the key to unlock the door to find that it was just a package delivery, but enough time had passed that the courier was nowhere to be seen.

(Yours wasn't a latency issue though, what kind of latency do you get with your 5-cloud services chain?)

Also, interesting about the SmartThings API access moving to a subscription model: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/28/samsungs-smartthings-api-ter... (this link is in the article - the cost is only for third party usage, not if you're directly using the SmartThings app).

> the upcoming Samsung SmartThings API pricing

Imagine paying a Korean company five bucks a months so you can get a notification on your phone that your fridge needs a new water filter.

People really need to touch grass.

It's video surveillance, it makes it more likely they'll go elsewhere. That's literally the whole point of Ring.