TL;DR
If your Arlo Secure bill jumped in early 2026, you're not misreading it. In the UK some plans went from £2.50 to £7.99 a month; a Norwegian customer's annual plan climbed from 690 NOK to 1,155 NOK (~+67%); mainland-Europe pricing has settled around €88/year; and US customers have seen yet another raise on top of the climbs since 2023. So the honest answer to "do I have to keep paying?" is: no — but only if you're honest with yourself about what you're protecting. For an indoor, powered spot — a doorway, a nursery shelf, a back room, a desk you want eyes on — an old Android phone running a free, local-only camera app replaces a subscription Arlo completely, with no monthly fee and nothing leaving your house. For a weatherproof, battery-powered, mounted-outside-in-the-rain Arlo, it doesn't, and I'll say so before you waste a Saturday finding out the hard way.
I'm the developer of Background Camera RemoteStream, a free Android app that turns a spare phone into a continuously-recording camera with the screen off, stores everything locally with no cloud account, and serves a live view to your own browser over your home Wi-Fi. So I'm an interested party. I'm going to try to earn your trust the only way that works in this category: by being specific about the numbers and blunt about what a phone can't do.
