About DIY Home Security HQ

We are the home security review site that asks the questions other sites are afraid to publish: What becomes worthless when you cancel? What dies during an AWS outage? What does the 3-year cost actually look like?

Why This Site Exists

The affiliate home security review ecosystem is broken in a specific and predictable way: most sites earn their highest commissions from Ring and SimpliSafe, which also happen to have the most aggressive subscription models. The financial incentive to recommend the cheapest-to-write-about, highest-payout products is enormous. The incentive to explain why a $99 starter kit costs $1,100 over 3 years is close to zero.

We built DIY Home Security HQ to close that gap. We calculate the real 3-year cost for every brand, test offline behavior, audit customer service anonymously, and score subscription fairness as its own metric.

How We Fund This Site

We earn affiliate commissions if you purchase through our links — primarily Amazon affiliate commissions at the standard rate. We disclose all affiliate relationships in the footer of every page and in our full affiliate disclosure.

We have never accepted payment to change or improve a brand score. We have never received free hardware from a manufacturer. Every product in every review was purchased at retail price from a public storefront.

The Review Team

DIY Home Security HQ is run by a small team of home improvement and technology writers who have been covering security hardware since before "smart home" was a product category. We test products in real residential settings — not a test lab — and publish results that reflect what actual homeowners experience.