Camera System Total Cost of Ownership

Most camera quotes show you year one. This shows you the whole life of the system, with every assumption on screen where you can change it.

The numbers below are placeholders, not market rates. They exist so you are not staring at empty boxes. Replace every one with figures from your own quote. This tool does the arithmetic, it does not know your pricing.

Your system

Number of cameras Hardware cost per camera One-time, per camera. Placeholder. Installation labour per camera One-time, per camera. Placeholder. Expected system life (years)

Recurring costs

Licence & software per camera per year Defaults to 0 deliberately. Some systems require an ongoing per-camera licence to operate at all; others have none. Put in what your quote says. Storage / retention per camera per year Cloud retention, on-prem drives amortised, or 0 if it is included. Placeholder. Support / maintenance per camera per year Placeholder. Expected replacements over the system life Whole cameras replaced across the period, at hardware cost. 0 if covered by warranty.

Enter your figures above. The total updates as you type.

How this is calculated

Up-front = cameras × (hardware + installation).
Recurring = cameras × (licence + storage + support) × years.
Replacements = replacement count × hardware cost.
Total = up-front + recurring + replacements.

Deliberately simple, and here is what it does not do: no inflation, no discounting to present value, no financing cost, no electricity or bandwidth, no staff time to review footage. Those are real and they vary far too much by site for a default to be anything but a guess. If they matter to your decision, add them to the per-year figures above, and the arithmetic will carry them.

Every number here is one you entered. Nothing is fetched, nothing is stored, and nothing is sent anywhere. The calculation runs entirely in your browser.

Weighing one system against another? See the comparisons.