The Amazon Ring Drone Security Camera Is Finally Here (It's Real This Time, Promise)

Amazon has announced the Ring Drone Cam, a flying indoor security camera that patrols your home. You might be thinking this is old news, and you wouldn't be mistaken. You see, the company showed off an indoor security drone called the Always Home Cam back in September 2020 and promised it would ship the following year. It rolled out to a small group of U.S. buyers on an invite-only basis in late 2021 but never made it to general release, and disappeared in 2024. So the new Ring Drone Cam arrives with something to prove.

This time there's a price and a shipping date attached to the camera. It costs $249.99 and will start shipping in the U.S. from January 27, 2027. It launches next to the Ring Rover Cam, a $999.99 wheeled patrol robot built for businesses that borrows its roving security trick from Amazon's Astro. Both products sit under a new arm of Ring that the company is calling Ring Robotics — suggesting there may be more on the way. Amazon says that the drone camera means you no longer need multiple cameras in your home, and can instead purchase this one device. If you've been weighing up one of the household robots already on sale, this is a good option for security rather than chores.

When not in use, the Ring Drone Cam sits in a dock with its camera shuttered, lifts off when you tell it to (or when something sets it off), and flies the routes you've set. If one of your other Ring cameras, sensors, or alarms is triggered, the drone takes off by itself and heads to the area, so you can actually look at the room rather than just receive a notification about it. You can launch the Drone Cam on demand too, and it can be controlled with Alexa Home Map, the house-mapping feature Amazon introduced with the Echo Show 16 last month.

To set up the Drone Cam, you will have to carry it around your home while it builds a floor plan, which is likely safer than trying to fly it around indoors. It'll then suggest spots in your home worth watching, such as a side door or the end of a corridor. Mapping and the in-flight navigation both run on a system that Ring calls AI Pilot, which uses the camera, onboard sensors, and cloud processing to steer around furniture it finds in the way. It records video in 2K across a 148-degree field of view, and the drone can rotate a full 360 degrees to cover an entire room from one position. It has two built-in LEDs, which can switch on by themselves in low light.

For many, a camera that follows you around your own house is a harder sell than one bolted to a wall. Given the privacy trade-offs that come with any Ring camera, and the fact that Amazon — a company that doesn't exactly have the best reputation when it comes to privacy — has already had to answer for how staff handled customer camera feeds, it perhaps matters more on this camera than others. But the company has clearly put some thought into making the Drone Cam as privacy-friendly as it can be, with a number of features to provide peace of mind.

The camera stays off while docked, and there is a physical shutter. The drone only records once it's airborne, and an LED tells you when it's rolling. The propellers are audible by design — so much so, The Verge described the Drone Cam as "noisy as heck" — which Ring frames as a deterrent. Although I can't help but think that it doubles as a warning for any intruders in your home who would also rather not be filmed. Footage is covered by Throw Away the Key encryption, which Ring describes as its strongest default encryption yet.

The scheduled flight routes and video review features both require a paid Ring Protect subscription plan to operate, so $249.99 isn't the whole cost of the Drone Cam. The product announcement also mentions the new device hasn't yet been authorized under Federal Communications Commission rules and can't be sold or leased until it is. So although it's providing a January shipping date, I'd treat this as a target rather than a guarantee. The Rover Cam, which carries no such caveat, will ship earlier on December 16, 2026.