Apple Home’s new security camera features cost up to $60 a month
Apple Intelligence upgrades to HomeKit Secure Video come with a steep cost.
Apple Intelligence upgrades to HomeKit Secure Video come with a steep cost.
by
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Sep 14, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC
Image: The Verge
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for
Wirecutter,
Wired,
Dwell,
BBC, and
US News.
With thepublic release of iOS 27 and tvOS 27, Apple Home is getting an injection ofApple Intelligence— but you’ll have to pay more for it.
Apple Intelligence for Homebrings AI-powered video summaries toHomeKit Secure Video, so you can get short text descriptions of who and what compatible security cameras saw, along with the clip. Italso adds a new video search featureand the ability to stitch footage from multiple cameras into one clip, making it easier to keep an eye on what’s happening around your home without scrolling through footage.
But to get these features, you’ll need topay $9.99 a month for the 2TB iCloud Plus plan(or $39.95 a month for an Apple One Premier subscription) — and that’s just for one camera. According to anApple support page, to add Apple Intelligence to a second camera, you’ll have to pay$29.99 a month for the 6TBplan. For up to five cameras, it’s a whopping $59.99 a month for the 12TB plan. No word on whether you can add more than five cameras. (Recordings from HomeKit-connected cameras don’t count toward your storage quota.)
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That’s way too expensive. While the improved video features are useful —I’ve been testing them in betaand have been impressed — they’re not good enough to justify that big a price jump.
HomeKit Secure Video has always been behind a paywall, but it started at a very reasonable $1 a month. That’s for the 50GB iCloud Plus plan, which includes recorded footage from one camera, plus smart alerts and facial recognition. For more cameras, you bump up to 2TB / $9.99 a month (up to five), and 6TB / $29.99 a month or higher for unlimited cameras. But the cost for the Apple Intelligence features is a huge increase.
I currently pay $40 a month for Apple One Premier, which includes 2TB of iCloud storage and gets me HomeKit Secure Video support for five cameras. With the new pricing tier, I keep those benefits and now get Apple Intelligence on one camera. But to get it on all five cameras, I’d need to pay anadditional$60 a month. That’s $720 a year, for a total of $1,200.
Amazon’s RingandGoogle Nestcharge around $20 a month for subscription tiers that include similar AI-powered features for their cameras, and both companies offer more features than Apple currently does. An iCloud Plus plan does include storage for photos, files, and device backups, and higher plans may get you higher limits for Siri AI and other Apple Intelligence features, but Apple hasn’t released any details about that.
The good news is that none of this changes what you get with HomeKit Secure Video today, and the new software releases have added under-the-hood upgrades that improve speed and reliability, plus the service now supports 4K video resolution. But while Apple Intelligence feels like asignificant improvement for Apple Home, at these prices, the value just isn’t there.
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- Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
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