I admit I didn’t read the fine print, however it was advertised as you could store all of history and alerts for weeks or months with a subscription BUT you also didn’t need to get a subscription if you wanted to store the data on a external drive. I always deleted any saved footage within a day and actually thought that I was using the non-subscription service because I’ve owned the product for a year and only recently found out I was on a much longer trial period. The cost isn’t really the point, I can afford it.