Frigate, on your phone.
No cloud. Native H.265.
ViewPane is the companion app for Frigate NVR — iOS today, Android coming. Built for self-hosted users who already run their own stack, want it on their phone, and refuse to hand camera feeds to a vendor cloud to make it work.
Built by people who actually run Frigate.
Every feature here exists because the existing Frigate-companion apps in the Play Store don't ship it, get it wrong, or hide it behind a subscription that makes the math worse than just opening a browser tab.
Native HEVC live playback
Hardware H.265 decode on both Android and iOS. Live streams go straight from your camera to the HEVC silicon already in your phone — no server re-encoding, no codec store dance. Full 4K, full frame rate, full clarity. Event clips are delivered mobile-optimized so they play smoothly on any device.
Mobile browsers fail thisZero cloud, zero telemetry
No vendor account. No data harvesting. The app talks to your Frigate server and the relay you host on your own hardware — nothing else (the only exception is the opt-in push token registration described in our privacy policy). Your footage stays between your devices and your server.
Tailscale-native remote access
Connect to your Frigate from anywhere without port-forwarding, dynamic DNS, or punching holes in your firewall. Install Tailscale, paste your server's MagicDNS name as the External URL, and ViewPane switches between home and away on its own.
Push alerts via your own broker
Object detection events are forwarded as push notifications through a self-hosted relay (person alerts can hold a few seconds so Frigate's face recognition can veto them). No Frigate cloud, no FCM-as-a-product. Your broker, your alerts. Delivery is best-effort — see the note under Pricing.
ProMulti-camera grid
2 or 3 columns — your pick, saved per device. Every camera on one screen, refreshed on your schedule. Tap any tile for low-latency fullscreen with pinch-to-zoom. Live mode for the whole grid (Live Wall) is a Pro feature.
Event browser + filters
Browse Frigate's detection events with zones, scores and frame metadata on every card. Pro adds full history, camera/label/time filters, and clip playback.
Works with any Frigate install
Self-hosted Frigate (community open-source), Frigate+ subscription with custom-trained models, or a commercial Frigate appliance — same API, same app, no separate SKU.
frigate-auth ready
Works with Frigate's own built-in login (0.16+) and the community frigate-auth nginx setup — your existing login persists. Credentials live in your phone's OS-level secure keychain and never touch a third-party server.
Designed to fit the way you already host.
ViewPane ships as a thin client. Your Frigate, your broker, your storage, your network. The app just gives you a great phone-shaped window into all of it.
One price. No upsells.
Free is a real product, not a 7-day teaser. Pro adds push notifications and the multi-server, full-history features power users actually want — but if you're happy with the browser, the browser is fine, and we mean that.
Free
- 1 Frigate server
- Multi-camera grid (snapshot tiles)
- Native H.265 live playback
- Fullscreen + pinch-zoom
- Last 20 events
- LAN + Tailscale access
- Demo mode — try it with zero setup
Pro
- Unlimited Frigate servers
- MQTT push notifications
- Full event history + filters
- Clip playback + save/share
- Live Wall — live mode for the multi-camera grid
On the roadmap, not in the box yet: ViewPane Desktop, Live Wall on your PC, unlocked by your phone's Pro. Aiming for Q1 2027.
What ViewPane is not
ViewPane is a viewer for a Frigate server you run. It is not an alarm system or a monitored security service, and push notifications are best-effort: they can be delayed or dropped by your network, your relay, or Apple's and Google's push services. Don't rely on it as your only way of knowing what your cameras see. The full version of that is in our Terms.
The Coffee Model
$9.99/year is two coffees. Buy us two coffees a year and we keep ViewPane in its best shape — bug fixes shipping, Frigate-version compatibility holding, docs current. That's the whole deal. No drip campaign, no newsletter, no engagement funnel.
Download it free. Android users, get the link the day it lands.
iOS is live today on the App Store. Android is heading into Google Play closed testing: testers get it first, and there's no date for the public listing yet. Get on the list for the test, or drop us a line and we'll send the Play Store link the day it opens. No drip campaign. No newsletter. One email, then silence.