In the quiet calculus of modern home security, Roku's video doorbells arrive at an affordable price but reveal a deeper truth about how technology companies now structure value: the device is merely the threshold, and the subscription is the door. For $90 to $120, homeowners gain a camera that watches — but without a recurring payment, it watches with significant blind spots, most notably a five-minute gap between recorded events that leaves any home momentarily unguarded. This is not a flaw in the product so much as a deliberate architecture of dependency, one that Roku shares with Ring and a