Does AOV Recording Need a Cloud Subscription If the Camera Already Has a Memory Card?

Short answer: no. If the camera has a microSD card in it, AOV (Always-On Video) recording and playback work without any paid cloud plan. The continuous video is written to the card inside the camera, and you retrieve it from the phone app over the 4G link. A cloud subscription is an optional extra that buys you an off-site second copy and instant sharing — it is not what makes the recording happen. Every SolaGuard model ships with a microSD slot supporting cards up to 128 GB as standard (larger capacities only on custom orders), and none of them require a subscription to record, to replay the card, or to receive alerts.

That answer needs three qualifications, because "no subscription needed" is true of the hardware but not automatically true of the service you buy around it. Below is what actually costs money, what a cloud plan genuinely adds, and the specific questions to put to any supplier — including us — before you commit an order.

Where AOV footage actually lives

An always-on video camera is doing something a PIR camera does not: it encodes video continuously rather than waking on a motion trip. That stream has to land somewhere within seconds of being captured, and there are only two candidate destinations.

The local card. The camera writes a rolling continuous file set to the microSD card. This happens whether or not the SIM has data left, whether or not the network is congested, and whether or not you have paid anybody anything this month. It is the primary record. When the card fills, the oldest segments are overwritten — that is the intended behaviour, not a fault.

The cloud. Uploading a 24-hour continuous stream off-site would mean pushing every recorded second up a cellular link. On a solar-powered, battery-buffered camera that is the single most expensive thing you can ask the radio to do, in both data and watt-hours. So in practice no serious 4G solar product uploads full continuous AOV video by default. What cloud plans upload are events: clips and snapshots around an AI detection.

That distinction is the whole answer to the search that brought you here. Continuous AOV lives on the card. Cloud plans handle event clips. Cancelling a cloud plan does not stop 24/7 recording; it stops the off-site copy of the event clips.

What a cloud plan does and does not add

Read that table honestly and the case for cloud narrows to one real risk: a thief takes the camera and the evidence goes with it. That is a genuine scenario on a remote fence line, and it is why some buyers put a cloud plan on their perimeter units and none on the units inside a locked yard. It is a per-site decision, not a product-wide one.

The retention question you should actually be asking

Buyers ask "is there a subscription?" when the question underneath is usually "how many days of footage will I have when something happens?" That is arithmetic, and you can do it before you buy:

Days of retention = card capacity ÷ video written per day

Neither term is a mystery, but only one of them is on the box. The capacity is yours to choose, with 128 GB the standard ceiling across our catalogue. The daily write volume depends on the encoder bitrate the camera uses in its low-power always-on mode, which is nearly never printed on a datasheet.

So make it a written question to the supplier: what is the average recorded bitrate in continuous AOV mode, at the resolution I am ordering, and does the camera reduce the bitrate or the frame rate when nothing is moving? A supplier who cannot answer that in a sentence has not measured it. A supplier who answers with a single number and no mention of the scene-analysis behaviour is quoting you the peak, and your real retention will be better than they said — which is fine, but it tells you they are reading a chip spec rather than field data.

Two follow-ups that change the answer

• Does the camera keep a continuous baseline plus higher-quality event segments? Most sensible AOV implementations do. It means your retention is dominated by the low-rate baseline, and the events you actually care about are stored at full quality.
• Is the card overwritten in a true loop? If the camera stops recording when the card is full rather than overwriting, a subscription becomes a hidden requirement — the local record silently ends and only the cloud keeps running. Ask.

The recurring cost that is real: the SIM

Cloud is optional. Cellular data is not. A 4G camera without an active data plan is a local recorder you have to walk to. Every buyer who assumes "no subscription" means "no recurring cost" has budgeted wrong, and it is the most common surprise in the first month of a deployment.

What you control is how much data the camera pulls. Live view is the expensive habit — a manager who opens the app twenty times a day on a dozen cameras will move far more data than the alerts do. In a fleet, decide early whether operators are allowed casual live view or whether they work from alert clips, because that policy sets the SIM tariff you need. Pooled data across the fleet rather than per-SIM allowances is almost always the cheaper structure once you pass a handful of units.

What to lock down before a wholesale order

If you are buying to resell, the subscription question becomes a support-cost question — every unclear answer here turns into a phone call from a customer six months out. Put these in the purchase order, not in an email thread:

1. No mandatory account tier. Confirm in writing that recording, playback and alerts function on the free app tier indefinitely.
2. Maximum supported card size and class, and who supplies the cards. Our standard is up to 128 GB; if a customer needs more, that is a custom order and has to be quoted as one.
3. Behaviour when the card is absent or fails — does the camera alert you, or silently record nothing?
4. Whether any cloud plan is region-locked, which matters if you sell across borders.
5. Data ownership and export on any cloud tier you do resell, in a format an insurer will accept.

For OEM and private-label buyers there is a further lever: the app tier, branding and default storage behaviour are all specifiable at the factory. Our manufacturer, Shenzhen Leksell, has been building this category since 2012 and holds TÜV Rheinland certification alongside CE, FCC and RoHS. MOQ is 10 units for a trial order and 100 for OEM/ODM work, across a catalogue of 150 SKUs with wholesale prices quoted per order — see the full range or the AOV solar camera guide for how always-on recording differs from PIR wake-up in the field.

Putting it together

For a single farm or yard, buy the largest card the model supports, skip the cloud, and spend the money on a data plan that lets you actually check the camera. For a multi-site operator, put cloud on the exposed units where losing the camera means losing the evidence, and leave it off everywhere else. For a dealer, the sentence that closes the sale is the plain one: the card records 24/7 whether you pay anyone or not.

Sample units ship in 7–10 days by air and bulk orders in 25–40 days by sea, with 7–10 business days inside Vietnam from our Ho Chi Minh City office. Installation is 5–10 minutes per camera, IP66 on outdoor models, 1080p–2K standard with 4K available as a custom build. Dealer pricing starts at 20% from around 10 units and 30% from around 50 — the wholesale terms page has the structure, and a quote for your quantity comes from a person, not a form.

WhatsApp +86 188 1869 9870 — https://wa.me/8618818699870 · info@solaguard.net