A popular smart camera brand sells its hardware for less than a hundred dollars, sometimes less than fifty during a sale. That price gets people in the door. What it does not include is the ability to actually see more than a few hours of footage after it happens, get a real alert instead of a generic motion ping, or in some cases view the live feed at all, without paying a monthly fee on top of it. Buy five cameras for the house and the hardware discount starts looking a lot smaller next to a subscription that renews every month for as long as you own the system.
Run the math out five years and the picture changes completely. A ten dollar a month camera plan, which is on the low end for a multi-camera household, comes to six hundred dollars over five years, on top of whatever the hardware cost. Go with a plan that includes more cameras or longer storage and it is easy to clear a thousand. None of that spend buys you a better camera. It buys you continued permission to use the one already mounted on your wall, month after month, indefinitely, with no point where the payments stop.
A RezSmart install prices the equipment and the installation once. There is no ongoing camera fee, no storage subscription, no tier you have to upgrade into to get alerts that actually mean something. The cost of the system is the cost of the system. Five years in, the only difference is that you have owned it outright the entire time instead of renting access to your own footage.
Cheap hardware with an expensive subscription behind it is not actually cheap. It is just a bill that shows up in smaller pieces, spread out so it is easier to not notice.