Amcrest is king. Cheap, original, specialized, American based.

I've been using TP-link Kasa cams for a bit, I have four of them now. If you're hyper conscious about security it's probably best not to look at their EUC though, but otherwise I quite like them.

The other downside is that the newer models require a subscription, the older models don't. I have the KC110 and KC120.

I use a Blink camera. It will send me a notification when there’s motion, and I can look through the live camera at any time.

For a paid subscription, I can have it save clips when it detects motion, for later review.

I use Blink cameras for my outdoors, but they also make indoor cameras as well and with the Sync Module you can keep clips and have motion detection without storing any data on the cloud or needing a subscription. Cheap, but they work well. Their "Cloud" service was shit when I tried it with the 30 days free, so shit, I ended up canceling it so I could just use the Sync Module after about 2 weeks.

I’m not done yet, but I’m working on this:

https://github.com/sciactive/soteria

It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but maybe you could help him. It just needs a WebDAV server, so you could use something like Google Drive, which I think supports WebDAV.

It can be set up on a laptop. You just need a Linux system with a webcam. But yeah, if he’s not comfortable setting up software through the terminal, it probably wouldn’t work for him.

I use the Alfred app and an old smartphone as a camera

I made my own with a simple python script that sends me a telegram message when it sees movement. With gpt you don't need to have coding experience to make simple things like this.

I’ve been using Arlo products for over five years. There are definitely things they could improve, but for what you’re describing, it seems a good fit.

Here’s one: https://www.arlo.com/en-us/cameras/essential/arlo-essential-indoor-v2.html

I’ve since switched to UniFi because video can be captured directly to my UDM.

I have a TP-Link Kasa indoor WiFi camera. This one in particular. It's not a self-hosted camera that uses an NVR or anything. It's accessible from the Kasa app on iOS (and Android). It requires a microSD card to store footage.

There is a cloud subscription option to recorded footage, but it's not required. I am subscribed though, because if a camera is stolen/broken during a break-in or something, there goes all the recordings that one might need.

Any onvif cameras and blue iris. You can integrate it with AI and get person detected alerts and more.

This isn’t really a c/asklemmy question. Please use a more appropriate comm next time.