This guide describes the Mac sensing implementation. See Mac and Windows options for platform availability; features and permissions vary by platform.
Self-Monitored vs. Professionally Monitored Home Security
Every home-security system eventually reduces to the same question: when a sensor fires at 2 a.m., who finds out, and what do they do about it? The two answers on the market are professional monitoring — a staffed center receives the alarm and escalates — and self-monitoring, where the alert goes straight to you. Neither is universally better. This guide lays out how each actually works, where each fails, and how to decide.
What professional monitoring actually is
With professional monitoring, your alarm panel signals a central monitoring station over the internet, cellular, or a phone line. A trained operator sees the event, typically attempts to reach you or your listed contacts to rule out a false alarm, and — if the alarm can't be resolved — requests dispatch of police, fire, or medical responders for your address.
What you're paying the recurring fee for:
- A human on duty at all hours. The alarm is acted on even if you're asleep, on a flight, or in a dead zone.
- An escalation path to emergency services that doesn't depend on you being reachable.
- Process. Verification calls, contact lists, and dispatch protocols exist so a single sensor blip doesn't automatically send a patrol car.
And the structural costs, beyond the monthly bill:
- Contracts and lock-in. Many providers require multi-year terms, and some tie monitoring to their own hardware.
- False-alarm exposure. Many municipalities require alarm permits and fine repeated false dispatches — and the fine lands on you, not the monitoring company.
- Latency by design. The verification step that prevents needless dispatch also means minutes can pass between the sensor firing and anyone acting.
- A third party in the loop. The monitoring center — and usually the vendor's cloud — sees your arm/disarm schedule, your events, and often your camera feeds.
What self-monitoring actually is
A self-monitored system skips the middleman: sensors and logic run in your home, and alerts route directly to your devices — a push notification, a text, an email, or a webhook into an automation you control. You look at the alert, judge it against context only you have ("that's the cat's room", "nobody should be home right now"), and decide what to do: check a feed, ping a neighbor, or call emergency services yourself.
Its structural advantages:
- No recurring monitoring contract. The alert path is infrastructure you already own — your phone.
- Zero-latency knowledge. You learn about the event as fast as a notification can travel; there's no verification queue ahead of you.
- Context-rich triage. You know your home. An operator reading a screen doesn't. Most "alarms" are explainable in two seconds by the person who lives there.
- Privacy. With a fully on-device system, no outside party learns when your home is armed, empty, or occupied. (Why that matters is covered in our guide to keeping smart-home data on your own hardware.)
And its honest weaknesses:
- You are the monitoring center. If your phone is silenced, dead, or off-grid, nobody is watching. Mitigations exist — critical-alert notification channels, a partner or trusted contact on the same alerts — but the failure mode is real.
- Dispatch is on you. Calling 911 from a beach in another time zone for an address back home is possible but clumsy.
- Some insurers discount only professionally monitored systems. Check your policy's actual wording before assuming either way.
The comparison that matters: failure modes
Instead of comparing feature lists, compare what happens when things go wrong.
- False alarm. Professional: possible fine, awkward calls, alarm fatigue at the monitoring center. Self: you glance at your phone and dismiss it. Advantage: self-monitoring.
- Real intrusion while you're reachable. Professional: verification, then dispatch. Self: you know instantly and call it in with full context. Roughly even, different paths.
- Real intrusion while you're unreachable. Professional: the process runs without you. Self: the alert waits for you. Advantage: professional monitoring — this is the scenario the fee genuinely buys.
- Internet or power outage. Both models degrade; what matters is whether the local siren/logic still runs and whether you're told about the outage. Ask this question of any vendor.
- Vendor trouble. Professional systems and cloud-dependent self-monitored systems both inherit vendor risk: outages, price changes, discontinued products. A system whose logic runs on your own hardware keeps working regardless.
How to choose
Professional monitoring fits households that are frequently unreachable, want insurance-recognized monitoring, or simply want to outsource the 2 a.m. decision to someone paid to make it.
Self-monitoring fits people who keep their phone close, want alerts without contracts, care about who can see their occupancy data, and prefer to be the judge of their own alarms. It rewards a little setup discipline: test your alert path, enable critical alerts, and put a second person on the notification list.
Plenty of homes mix models over time — self-monitoring day to day, with the option to add third-party response if life changes. The important thing is to pick deliberately, not inherit the decision from whatever kit you bought.
How Vigil does self-monitoring
Vigil is self-monitored by design and says so plainly: it does not call a monitoring center or dispatch emergency services. Instead, its four security modes (Home / Away / Night / Off) arm a presence-sensing layer — no cameras required — and a qualifying event raises a logged alert, fires a macOS notification, and POSTs alert text to the HTTP or HTTPS endpoint you control. Use HTTPS because plain HTTP is unencrypted. A one-tap Send test alert checks the path before you rely on it. No monitoring contract or Black Label alert cloud sits between your house and that destination.