About
About Sensor & Latch
A small, reader-funded site about home security hardware you can own outright — with the specs sourced, the math shown, and the limits of what we know stated plainly.
Sensor & Latch covers smart locks, door and window sensors, security cameras and video doorbells, with one organizing question: what does this thing actually cost to own and keep running, and what does it still do when the internet is out and nobody is paying a monthly fee?
Who runs this site
Sensor & Latch is owned and operated by Type 5 Marketing LLC, a company in the United States that builds and runs independent publishing sites. We have no storefront, no showroom, and no phone line — the site is the business, and it is funded by affiliate commissions rather than by advertising, sponsorships or lead-selling to alarm companies.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A large share of the sites competing for these searches are, underneath, monitoring-lead businesses: their revenue depends on you signing a contract with a company that bills you monthly. We have no monitoring product and no monitoring partner, so when the honest answer is “buy the cheap sensor and no subscription,” there is nothing stopping us from writing it.
Who writes it
Stephen V. — Editor, Sensor & Latch
I'm an enthusiast — someone who's genuinely into this stuff, and that is the whole of the claim. I read the manuals, compile the published specs, and do the math on what a device actually costs to run. I haven't tested this hardware and I don't pretend to have. What I can tell you is what the spec sheet says, what the standard requires, what the subscription costs over five years, and when a product isn't right for you.
Every page on this site is written by Stephen V.and carries his byline. There is no anonymous content, no rotating pool of freelancers, and no masthead of job titles designed to look like a newsroom. One person, named, doing a specific and limited kind of work: reading primary documents and turning them into comparisons that don't exist anywhere else.
What we don't claim
Products we claim to have tested: 0.
Everyone in this category says they tested a dozen locks on their own front door. We haven't tested any, and we say so. Here is what we do instead: compile every published spec, read the manufacturer's manual, compute what the thing costs to run over five years, and cite all of it so you can check our work.
We have no lab. We do not own the hardware on these pages, we have not installed it, and we do not accept free units from manufacturers. So we do not write “in our testing,” we do not describe how a lock felt on a winter morning, and we do not publish a number of products tested — because the honest number is zero and dressing it up would be the one thing on this site we could never take back.
What we do have is documentary. We read the installation manual most buyers never open, including the dimensional page that tells you whether the lock fits your door. We compile protocol and compatibility matrices from primary sources, because no manufacturer will ever publish a table that includes its competitors. We run the five-year cost arithmetic and we show the inputs. And we publish the published standards — BHMA and ANSI grades, Matter and Thread certification, IP ratings — as numbers you can look up rather than adjectives.
The full process is written out on our methodology page, in enough detail that you could take the same public documents and rebuild any ranking on this site yourself. That reproducibility is the whole of what we ask you to trust. It is deliberately a smaller claim than the rest of this category makes, and it is one we can actually keep.
What we will not do
- No fear. No break-in stories, no sirens, no invitation to imagine the worst night of your life in order to sell you a twenty-dollar sensor. Readers in this category are here for specs and prices, and we treat them that way.
- No fabricated reviews or testimonials.Sensor & Latch is a new site with no customers, so there is nothing to quote, and a page with invented praise on it is worse than a page with none.
- No invented prices or ratings. Prices render live from Amazon with the date they were checked. When the data goes stale the number disappears rather than lying to you.
- No overstating what hardware does. A contact sensor reports that a door opened. Where life safety is genuinely at stake — fire, carbon monoxide, a medical alert — a monitored system may be the right answer, and we say so even though it earns us nothing.
How we make money
Affiliate commissions, and nothing else. When you buy something through a link on this site we may earn a commission from the retailer, at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. We do not sell placements, we do not run sponsored posts, and no brand pays to be included, ranked higher, or left out.
The reason that arrangement doesn't bend the coverage is structural rather than a promise about our character: our picks come out of a published, reproducible process that has no commission input in it anywhere, and several of our recommendations are cheaper products that pay us less than the ones we rejected. The full detail is in the affiliate disclosure, and the rules we bind ourselves to are in the editorial policy.
How to reach us
Email info@sensorandlatch.com, or use the contact form. It is the only address on this site and it reaches us directly.
Corrections get priority over everything else in the inbox. If a spec on a page contradicts the manufacturer's own document, send the link and we will fix it in place with a dated changelog line — we do not correct facts quietly. We cannot give individualized security advice, and we do not have a support relationship with any of the manufacturers we cover.
If you are new here, the two pages that best show what this site is for are what security subscriptions actually cost over five years and whether a smart lock will fit your door — the backset-and-bore question nobody else answers. Common questions about the site are collected on the FAQ.