Short answer: you can mount it, but you cannot use it.
What works without internet at the door
The mechanical part. Drill the bracket, mount it, wire it or charge it. None of that needs a connection.
What breaks immediately
Setup itself. The pairing flow happens in the app, the app talks to the doorbell over your home WiFi, and account creation is cloud-side. You can do that part from a phone on mobile data somewhere else, but the doorbell will not join a network that does not exist.
Then everything you bought it for:
- Live view. Needs the camera to reach the internet and your phone to reach the camera through its cloud relay.
- Motion notifications. Detection runs on the device on some models, but the notification path is cloud.
- Recording and history. Stored remotely by design. No connection means no history, and on most models there is no local fallback at all.
- Two-way talk. Same relay problem.
The one case that half-works
If a camera writes to a local SD card or an NVR, you keep footage during an outage. Ring's own models mostly do not do this, which is the single most common complaint after an ISP outage, and the reason people end up moving to PoE NVR systems.
What I would do differently
If internet at the property is genuinely unavailable or unreliable, a wired PoE camera into a local recorder is the honest answer. It costs more to install and it keeps working when the internet does not.
Full disclosure: I work on the manufacturing side and we build video doorbells, so I am not a neutral party here. Our units are Tuya-based and carry the same cloud dependency, which is exactly why I would not pretend otherwise. Spec sheet at https://www.xingliaoshop.com/product-category/smart-video-doorbell/
Xingliao Smart Home builds smart switches, video doorbells and security cameras on Tuya WiFi and Tuya ZigBee, and runs OEM/ODM programmes from Shenzhen. Factory and ODM capability.
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