The baby monitor passed down through our family was said to have been excavated from Pompeii and has cost us $0 dollars over several generations, not counting electricity cost of charging eneloops and Ikea ladda batteries.

I have a baby monitor, and considered using an IP camera before buying it. The reason I like mine is because I've got a separate little handheld monitor on RF instead of wifi. There's a handful of situations where it's fine in very handy. Our nanny could use it without us having to set her up with any tech. Works while traveling without having to deal with hotel Wi-Fi or hot spots. Works outside much further than my wifi reaches. I like the RF.

Because there's massive marketing spend to make everyone feel like subscription services are the only option. Because all the investment in development is only in efforts with rent seeking subscription crap.

We could have easy plug and play local interaction or for remote operation, a self hosting platform. Instead you generally have to carefully research until you find some brand that is amenable, maybe flash over their firmware with a custom image, and put the pieces together yourself in something like homeassisstant. There's nothing preventing companies from making local management as easy as cloud management except the rent seeking.

We did the exact same thing. The night vision worked well and it gave me peace of mind every night and every morning.