to live view, home or away
recordings stay on your Mac
accounts & subscriptions
once. That’s the whole price.
How it works
Stakeout lives in your menu bar. Pick any webcam — the built-in one, a USB camera, or your iPhone via Continuity — and click Arm. Your Mac stays awake and watching.
Apple’s Vision framework runs person detection on your Mac — not in a cloud. No false alarms from shadows or headlights. When someone appears, Stakeout records a clip with the seconds before they entered the frame.
A push alert with a snapshot lands on your lock screen. Open live view in seconds — from the next room or another country — watch the recorded clip, or disarm the camera.
Privacy, with receipts
Every security-camera company says “private.” Stakeout is built so the promise is structural — the code that would upload your footage doesn’t exist. Two independent security reviews verified each claim below against the source.
Clips live in ~/Movies/Stakeout, hardened to owner-only permissions. The sync layer has no code path that can read a video file — verified structurally, not by policy. When you ask to watch a clip remotely, it streams to your phone encrypted and is deleted when you close the player.
Person detection is Apple’s Vision framework running locally. The detection engine is enforced networking-free by automated checks on every build.
There’s no Stakeout account to create. Alerts and remote control ride your own iCloud, scoped to your Apple ID. Buy the app once for $39 — no monthly cloud bill, ever.
Live video and clips stream directly between your Mac and iPhone over WebRTC (DTLS-SRTP). The connection is set up through a service that only passes sealed, encrypted messages — it can’t read them, can’t see your video, and stores nothing.
The details, stated plainly: alert snapshots (a few JPEG frames per event) sync through your private iCloud so your phone can show you what happened — you can turn that off. To make remote access fast from anywhere, a stateless connection service relays encrypted call-setup messages it cannot read. Your video never touches it, and it stores nothing.
Features
Clips include the seconds before the trigger, so you see them walk in — not just walk away.
A photo of what the camera saw, on your iPhone, seconds after detection.
Tap Go Live on home Wi-Fi or from across the world and see through your camera in seconds, encrypted end to end.
Leaving home? Arm from your phone. Back home? Disarm before you walk in the door.
Stream any recorded clip from your Mac, scrub through it, close it — nothing is stored on the phone.
Camera unplugged? Mac slept? Stakeout records honest monitoring gaps and tells you — no fake “all clear.”
Age and size limits you set. One-time cleanup confirmations. Your disk, your rules.
Menu-bar native, keyboard-friendly, VoiceOver-labeled, reduced-motion aware. No Electron.
Pan, tilt, and zoom gimbal cameras like OBSBOT from your phone — in development now.
Pricing
Security cameras shouldn’t need a subscription. There’s no cloud storage bill hiding behind Stakeout, because your recordings live on your own Mac — so you pay for software once, like you used to.
Includes the iPhone companion app, all current features, and free updates. Try everything for 30 days first.
Questions
Yes — your Mac is the camera and the recorder, which is exactly why your footage stays private. While armed, Stakeout keeps the Mac awake. If the Mac sleeps or the camera disconnects anyway, Stakeout records an honest monitoring gap and shows it in your timeline instead of pretending nothing happened.
Your Mac and phone connect directly, peer-to-peer, with the video end-to-end encrypted. To introduce the two devices quickly, Stakeout uses a tiny connection service that only passes sealed setup messages — it can’t read them, never sees your video, and stores nothing. That’s what makes “check my camera from anywhere” take seconds, not minutes.
Event metadata, alert snapshots (optional), your Mac’s status, and arm/disarm commands — all in your personal iCloud private database, readable only by your Apple ID. Video never syncs. Live view and clip playback stream peer-to-peer with end-to-end encryption.
Any camera macOS can see: the built-in FaceTime camera, USB webcams (including premium ones like OBSBOT and Insta360 Link), and your iPhone via Continuity Camera. Motorized pan/tilt/zoom control for gimbal cameras is on the roadmap.
Those are cloud cameras: your footage lives on someone else’s servers, behind an account, usually behind a subscription. Stakeout is local-first software for hardware you already own — the recordings are files on your Mac, the AI runs on your Mac, and the only “cloud” involved carries encrypted alerts and connection setup it can’t read. $39 once, not $100+ a year.
No — and not because of a promise. There is no Stakeout account, and no code path that uploads your video. Even the service that helps your devices connect only ever handles sealed, encrypted messages it cannot open. Automated checks enforce that separation on every release.
Recording stops; your footage stays yours. Buy the license and everything picks up where it left off. No dark patterns, no locked files.