Comparison
What video analytics actually costs, and where the money goes
Almost nobody in this category publishes a number. Here is ours, what sits inside it, and the five line items that turn a quoted price into the price you actually pay.
VuePoint
Search for what a video surveillance system costs and you will mostly find pages that answer with "it depends" and a contact form. It does depend. It does not depend so much that the question cannot be answered usefully, and the reluctance to answer it is itself informative — a price that cannot be stated is usually a price that varies by how much the buyer seems able to pay.
So: our solar, cellular-connected units are under $1,000 per unit per month. That figure includes the hardware, the connectivity, the analytics, and the software. Below is what sits inside a number like that, wherever you buy it, and the specific places where quotes stop being comparable.
The five things you are actually buying
| Component | What it covers | How it is usually charged |
|---|---|---|
| Camera hardware | The sensor, housing, mount, and on solar units the panel and battery bank | Capital purchase, or amortised into a monthly fee |
| Compute | The processor running the analysis — on the unit, on a site server, or in a data centre | Bundled with hardware at the edge; a separate server or cloud line otherwise |
| Analytics software | The detection models and the rules engine | Per camera per month, almost always |
| Connectivity | Cellular data, or the site network it uses instead | Per unit per month, or invisible if it rides existing site network |
| Deployment | Getting it installed, positioned, aimed and configured | One-off, or bundled — and this is where quotes diverge most |
Why the same site gets wildly different quotes
Two proposals for one site can differ by several multiples without either being dishonest, because they are solving the same problem with very different assumptions about power and network.
- A wired system assumes infrastructure exists. If there is power and network where you need coverage, that is genuinely the cheapest answer per camera and it is not close.
- Trenching changes everything. If power has to be brought to the position, the civil work routinely exceeds the cost of the equipment — and on landscaped or paved ground it can exceed it several times over.
- Solar and cellular skip the infrastructure and carry the cost in hardware. A bigger unit price, no trenching, and a data plan. On a site with no power at the fence line this is not a preference, it is the only option that works.
- Trailers carry a chassis. A road-legal chassis, mast and ballast are real manufacturing cost, and they are why trailer-based deployments sit at the top of this category's pricing.
The five line items that get quoted separately
These are the items most likely to appear after you have chosen a vendor rather than before. None of them is unreasonable. All of them are worth asking about while you still have leverage.
Ask about each of these before signing
- 1
Mobilisation and demobilisation
Getting the equipment to site and away again. On trailer deployments this is frequently a separate charge in both directions, and it recurs every time the unit moves between sites.
- 2
Repositioning during the job
Sites change shape. Ask what it costs to move a unit fifty metres in month four. If the answer is a truck booking, that cost will repeat, and units that are expensive to move tend to stop being moved — which quietly makes them less useful.
- 3
Data overage
Ask what happens if the unit exceeds its cellular allowance. Systems that stream continuously rather than analysing at the edge are far more exposed here, and overage is billed after the fact.
- 4
Contract length and exit
Multi-year terms are normal in this category. What matters is what happens if the project finishes early — a camera on a construction site outlives the project surprisingly often, and so does the contract.
- 5
Storage and retention
How long is footage kept, and what does extending it cost? Retention is often priced per camera per month on top of everything else, and the default is usually shorter than people assume.
Where our number comes from
Under $1,000 per unit per month, covering hardware, connectivity, analytics and software. The mechanism is not clever, which is rather the point: we removed the road chassis, the mast and the ballast, and with them the cost of manufacturing, transporting and parking a vehicle. What remains is a tripod-mounted unit one person can carry and reposition.
That has a real trade-off attached and it would be dishonest to omit it. You give up mast height. If your coverage plan genuinely depends on seeing across ten acres from a single high vantage point, a trailer does that and we do not — the full comparison is here.
Running analytics on cameras you already own is a different and generally lower line again, because there is no hardware in it. If you have an existing system that records but that nobody reviews, that is usually the cheapest place to start.
Cost per camera is the wrong unit
The instinct is to divide the total by the number of cameras and compare. It is the wrong comparison, because the number of cameras is a consequence of the design rather than a specification of it.
A site covered by four correctly placed units can produce better evidence than the same site covered by twelve badly placed ones, and cost less. The useful unit is cost per thing you actually need to know about — the gate, the laydown area, the fence line where people come over, the bin store that keeps collecting other people's rubbish. Count those first. The camera count follows from it.
Common questions
- How much does a video surveillance system cost?
- For solar, cellular-connected units with analytics included, ours are under $1,000 per unit per month covering hardware, connectivity and software. Wired systems on sites that already have power and network cost less per camera; anything requiring trenching costs substantially more, because the civil work routinely exceeds the equipment cost.
- How much does video analytics software cost on its own?
- Analytics is almost always priced per camera per month. Running it against cameras you already own avoids the hardware line entirely, which makes it the cheapest starting point for most sites that already have a recording system nobody reviews.
- Why will vendors not publish prices?
- Partly because deployments genuinely vary, and partly because a price that is quoted rather than published can be adjusted to the buyer. Ask for a total over the full contract term including deployment and removal, which is the form that makes two quotes comparable.
- Is it cheaper to buy the cameras outright?
- Sometimes, on a permanent site where nothing will move for years. On a project site the calculation usually favours a monthly model, because purchased hardware for a temporary position becomes an asset you own, store and redeploy — and the storage and redeployment are the costs people forget.
- What does it cost to move a unit during a project?
- For us, nothing beyond your own labour — the units are light enough for one person to carry and reposition. That is the practical difference from trailer-based systems, where relocation generally means a vehicle, a driver and a booking, and is often billed.
- What is the cost of a perimeter intrusion detection system?
- It depends almost entirely on whether the perimeter has power and network along its length. Where it does, cost scales with the number of positions. Where it does not, the honest comparison is against trenching to each position, which is where solar and cellular units become cheaper rather than more expensive. See our write-up on perimeter intrusion detection.
Want a number against your actual site?
Tell us the area, where the power is, and how long you need it. We will give you a figure and say plainly if a wired system would be cheaper.