Ring Drone Camera: $250 Price, Jan. 27 Release and How It Works

Six years after Ring first showed off a camera that flies around your living room, it says the thing is finally going on sale. The Ring Drone Cam will cost $249.99 and ship on Jan. 27, 2027, the Amazon-owned company announced Tuesday morning. There's a catch in the fine print: the Federal Communications Commission still has to sign off, so the date isn't locked yet.

Ring also unveiled a second machine, the Ring Rover Cam, a $999.99 rolling robot meant for stores and warehouses. Both are the first products under a new label, Ring Robotics, which the company calls a category of "autonomous, mobile security."

Ring drone camera price and release date

The drone costs $249.99 in the U.S. You can't actually order one today. Ring is taking email sign-ups for the Drone Cam, GeekWire reported, and the device hasn't yet received the FCC authorization it needs to be sold. Ring told CNBC the Jan. 27 ship date is pending that approval.

The hardware price isn't the whole bill. Scheduled flights, along with reviewing the Rover's recorded video, require a Ring Protect subscription, according to GeekWire. Ring didn't say which of its plan tiers cover the drone, so anyone budgeting for one should wait for that detail before assuming a cheaper plan will do.

The Rover Cam is further along. It's on preorder in the U.S. now and is scheduled to ship Dec. 16, 2026.

How the Ring Drone Cam works

Think of it as an indoor camera that can move itself to wherever the problem is. The drone sits in a square charging dock with its camera off. It takes off in one of three ways:

• On a schedule you set, as a routine patrol
• On demand, from the Ring app
• Automatically, when another Ring device fires, such as a door or window sensor, a motion alert or a water leak detector

Setup is hands-on. You carry the drone through the house so it can build a floor plan, and Ring's software, which it calls AI Pilot, uses that map to suggest spots worth checking and to plan its own routes around furniture. Ring says it can cover more than one floor. The earlier version could only follow paths an owner had recorded in advance.

Once it's up, the drone hovers around four or five feet off the floor and moves at a slow, steady pace, Tom's Guide wrote after an early demo. It shoots 2K video with a 148-degree field of view and carries two LED lights for checking dark rooms at night.

Flight time is short. Ring's figure is up to about eight minutes per charge, and Wired put it at five to eight. Then it flies back to the dock on its own.

Navigation relies on the cloud

The navigation runs through Amazon's cloud rather than on the drone itself. If it loses its connection, it's designed to land right away, Tom's Guide reported. That matters in practice. A flight path over a glass coffee table or a shelf of picture frames is a bad idea if your Wi-Fi ever drops out mid-patrol.

Can the Ring drone fly outside?

No. Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff told CNBC the drone can't legally fly outdoors under Federal Aviation Administration rules that require drones to stay within a pilot's line of sight. "We have told our customers not to do that because it's illegal," he said, adding that the company built in guardrails to stop it from leaving the house.

Because it stays indoors and weighs well under the FAA's 250-gram threshold, the Drone Cam doesn't need to be registered with the agency, Wired reported. Siminoff also told Wired the drone is assembled in Texas, a point that matters at a time when the FCC has restricted imports of foreign-made drones.

Its sales pitch leans partly on being seen. At a demo in New York on Monday, Siminoff described a burglar casing a house at night, then seeing lights and something flying past the window. "You're probably not going to go into that house," he told CNBC.

Privacy: what Ring says, and what critics say

A flying camera inside your home raises obvious questions, and Ring tried to answer some of them up front.

The drone keeps its camera off while docked. Both new devices flash an LED when they're recording, and Ring told CNBC that privacy is the "default" mode. The drone is also loud on purpose. Siminoff told Wired the propellers' buzz means nobody could secretly use it to snoop without the people at home hearing it.

On data, Ring uses its own encryption system, which rotates keys every few minutes. But Ring briefly holds a key so it can run cloud AI features, Wired noted, which makes it weaker than true end-to-end encryption. Every Ring account requires two-factor authentication to log in.

The trust question is bigger than any one device. Ring has long been criticized for its ties to police, and earlier this year it drew fresh scrutiny over a Super Bowl ad for an AI pet-finding tool called Search Party, then dropped a planned integration with license-plate camera company Flock Safety, CNBC reported. Thorin Klosowski of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired that buying a device like this is a personal choice, but people should think about how it will make others in the home, and guests, feel.

The $1,000 Ring Rover Cam, Astro's second life

The Rover Cam will look familiar to anyone who followed Amazon's Astro, the wheeled home robot from 2021. Ring rebuilt that hardware into a security robot for businesses and stripped off the cartoon face.

It has a telescoping 4K camera that rises to see over counters and shelves, a siren, two-way talk and a "light tower" that shines a circle on the ceiling so staff can spot where it is on a busy floor. Wired says it covers up to 5,000 square feet, patrols for about 30 minutes and then returns to its dock.

Amazon has been here before. It launched Astro for Business in November 2023 at $2,350, then discontinued it less than a year later, refunding buyers and shutting the robots off. The Rover costs less than half that. Buyers are still betting that Ring sticks with the product this time.

Why it took six years

Ring first showed a flying indoor camera, the Always Home Cam, in 2020, also at $249.99. It later opened an invitation list, but the device never reached general sale. Siminoff founded Ring, sold it to Amazon in 2018, left in 2023 and came back last year. He told CNBC he held off until Amazon could get the design, sensors and data processing right.

"The honest answer wasn't more cameras," Siminoff said in Ring's announcement, as quoted by GeekWire. His argument is that people want to see rooms where they'd never mount a fixed camera, and one moving camera can do that.

Is it worth waiting for?

For most households, waiting for reviews makes sense. The Drone Cam is cheaper than a lot of multi-camera setups, but it adds a subscription, depends on a steady internet connection, flies for minutes at a time and makes a racket that pets may not love. Its success also rests on an FCC approval that hasn't come through yet.

If you already own Ring sensors and a doorbell, it's the most interesting add-on Ring has shown in years. If you don't, January will bring real reviews, and possibly answers on which Protect plan you'd need.

Ring isn't the only company fielding hard questions about what home devices can see. We looked at a similar fight over Samsung TV spying claims and the Log4j report earlier this fall.