All of the new Star Wars movies are so boring and played out. They should just stop making them, but they won’t because they have to extract every single dollar from their IP.
Reolink has a wifi video doorbell that works great, it has an integration with Home Assistant but also with Frigate. I use Frigate personally, since it’s better at person detection and I can record directly to my server. If you don’t use Frigate, you can record to an SD card that you slot into the back of the doorbell.
For drives, Shuckstop has a table of current shuckable drive prices. Shucking is usually the cheapest way to get new drives, you just have to get them out of their external case (or in your case, leave them in and plug them into your pi, ideally with some sort of fan). There’s also ServerPartDeals for refurbished enterprise drives.
I wasn’t talking about whether or not to trust FOSS, I was talking about Zello (since it’s closed source, which I originally mentioned). There might not be a FOSS alternative, I don’t know since I have never needed a walkie talkie app. That’s why I didn’t mention one and only answered the first part of your question. You’re right that it probably can’t be fully trusted (because it’s closed source).
The reason FOSS will always be better is because claims like that can actually be validated and audited. Any company can claim their stuff is E2E encrypted, but you’ll never know if that’s true for closed source software. Even if they do actually do E2E encryption, you’ll likely not know if they’re doing it properly and with strong encryption algorithms.