- Smart home brand Shelly announced its new security camera ahead of IFA 2026
- It lets you view and store footage to microSD cards with no additional subscription cost
- You can upgrade to Shelly Premium for cloud-based storage and other smart features
The early IFA 2026 product announcements have started, and home tech company Shelly has unveiled its new smart home security camera — and I think it has a shot at becoming the next cheap Ring alternative.
The new indoor Shelly Camera is the latest affordable smart home device designed for those who want similar features to those found in the best home security doorbells, but want to avoid the catch of additional subscription fees.
With a reasonable $49.99/ £35 (approximately AU$65) price tag, the Shelly Camera sports all the basic features you need to ensure your home is covered to give you added peace of mind. Though the camera’s video quality isn’t as advanced as the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro’s 4K resolution (Shelly’s is limited to 1080P), its other features more than make up for it.
As well as 110-degree horizontal and 70-degree vertical fields of view, which should be enough to cover a single room, the Shelly Camera supports black-and-white night vision monitoring and is compatible with Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings. It’s also built to slot easily into your existing Shelly smart home ecosystem, working with other devices to trigger automations and activate lighting when movement is detected.
While many leading smart-home brands require you to sign up to a subscription in order to use their devices to their full potential, that’s not the case with the Shelly Camera.
One of the best parts about this camera is that it packs a fair amount of features that aren’t locked behind a subscription paywall. This includes its resolution specs mentioned above, as well as automations and two-way audio — but its free video storage is what makes the camera a winner.
As well as simply viewing live footage from your smartphone without saving it, you can save recordings locally on microSD cards, and though you’ll have to purchase SD cards separately, it works out a whole lot cheaper than a monthly subscription fee.
For a $50 security camera that gives you access to basic tools and a way to store footage locally for free, you really can’t go wrong. And for those who aren’t too savvy about their smart-home tech, these features should be more than sufficient.
All that said, Shelly does offer a premium tier for additional smarts. At 3.99 euros a month ($4.40 / £3.40 / AU$6.50), Shelly Premium gives you access to cloud-based storage for one camera, and even smarter automation upgrades. This includes AI-powered object-detection capabilities, allowing your device to easily distinguish between faces, pets, and even vehicles to trigger specific alerts, which you can customize.
Having a Shelly Premium subscription opens the door to a handful of additional capabilities to enhance your home security ecosystem, but I don’t think you’re missing out on too much if you decide to stick with its free, basic tier.
For the most part, it’s the storage element that convinces users to cave into subscription models, and here that's not a factor if you're happy to go with the SD card option — and the camera comes with a free three-month trial of Shelly Premium, so you can try out those extra features before deciding whether or not you need the subscription.
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