How to Compare Three CCTV Quotes Without Getting Caught Out

Why three quotes for the same shop come back so different

You send the same brief to three installers and the numbers come back nowhere near each other. The instinct is to assume one is greedy and one is a bargain. Usually neither is true. They have quoted three different jobs and only one of them has read the building.

CCTV is unusually easy to quote badly, because the visible part (the cameras) is the cheap part and the expensive part (the labour to cable them properly) is invisible until someone is standing on a ladder. An installer who has not surveyed the site does not know whether there is a ceiling void, whether the only route to the rear door is external, or whether the wall the recorder is going on is solid stone. So they guess, and they guess low, because a low guess wins the job.

This is how to read the three sheets in front of you and work out which one is actually the same product.

What a fair quote itemises

Every one of these belongs in a commercial quote. If an installer lists any of them as an optional extra, the headline figure is not the figure you will pay.

• A site survey, ideally at the time of day the risk is real, so the design reflects where the light is not.
• Cameras chosen per position: wide view, low light, wide dynamic range on bright-inside dark-outside doors, a dedicated number-plate camera on a gate.
• Cat6 cabling to every camera, run and tested, external grade outside, with the camera powered over the same cable.
• A recorder sized to your retention period, with a spare drive bay.
• Secure remote viewing on phone and laptop, separate logins for managers and staff, default passwords changed.
• The GDPR signage, a written retention policy and a subject access process.
• A named member of your staff trained to export footage with the time stamp intact.

The exclusions that turn a cheap quote expensive

A quote can be genuinely lower because the installer is leaner. Far more often it is lower because something below is missing, and each of these has a way of reappearing as a variation once the work has started and you have no leverage left.

• **Cabling priced as "assumed accessible route".** This is the big one. If the survey has not happened, this line is a guess, and the variation when it turns out to be wrong is unbounded.
• **Making good.** Someone has to fill, seal and paint where cable entered the wall. If it is not in the quote, it is either not happening or it is coming later.
• **Storage sized vaguely.** "30 days" depends on camera count, resolution and frame rate. A recorder that hits 30 days at low resolution will not at the resolution that makes a face identifiable.
• **Commissioning and handover.** Configuring users, setting retention, testing remote access and showing someone how to export. Without it you own equipment rather than a system.
• **Warranty terms.** Ask who honours it, for how long, and whether it depends on you holding a maintenance contract.
• **Working at height or out of hours.** If your cameras are high or the work cannot happen during trade, that cost exists whether or not it is written down.

The four things that actually move the number

Cable runs and the building. Labour is most of a CCTV install and cabling is most of the labour. A modern unit with a ceiling void is quick. A listed building, a stone pub or a unit where the only route is external and needs containment is not. Chester and parts of Liverpool and Leeds are full of buildings in the second category, and we price that honestly rather than discovering it on the day.

What the entrance camera has to do. A camera that shows someone came in is a different specification from a camera that shows who came in, at night, against a bright street. Licensing conditions on bars and clubs ask for the second, and it is the right thing to buy anyway, because identification is the whole point of the footage. We covered this at length in Hikvision vs the cheap kit.

Distance and darkness. Yards, car parks and perimeters need long-range and infrared cameras and often a pole or two. A number-plate camera on a gate is a specific piece of kit at a specific angle, not a general camera pointed at the entrance. These are why yard jobs are surveyed rather than priced from a table.

Whether the cameras are part of a security package. Cameras, an intruder alarm and door entry done on one visit total less than three separate jobs, because the survey, the cabling routes and the commissioning overlap. Our Chester boutique case study is an eight-camera system, an Ajax alarm and Paxton door entry in a single day.

The questions that expose a padded spec

Cheap quotes hide exclusions. Expensive ones sometimes hide cameras you do not need. These four questions surface both, and any installer worth using will answer them without hesitating.

• **"Why this camera in this position?"** Every position should have a reason: an entrance where you need identification, a till, a stockroom door, a fire exit. If the answer is coverage for its own sake, you are buying wide shots of the tops of people's heads.
• **"What retention does this actually give me, at the resolution you are quoting?"** Ask for the number of days at the settings on the quote, not at the settings that make the drive look bigger.
• **"Which of these cameras could I drop, and what would I lose?"** A good installer will tell you straight. Some positions are load bearing and some are nice to have, and knowing which is which is how you cut a quote sensibly instead of arbitrarily.
• **"What happens on day two if a camera stops?"** Response time, who holds the spares, and whether a callout is chargeable.

What you should not be paying for

• A monthly fee for storing or viewing your own footage. A locally recorded IP system is yours; per-camera cloud subscriptions are for a single door or a temporary site.
• A "GDPR compliance pack" sold separately. Signage and a retention policy are part of a proper install.
• A maintenance contract as a condition of the warranty. Support is useful and we offer it, but the system should work without it.
• More cameras than the survey justifies. Eight cameras in the wrong places are worse than five in the right ones, and they total more.

Putting the three side by side

Line them up and check the same things on each: the number of cameras and their positions, the camera model per position, the recorder storage in days at the quoted resolution, who runs the cabling and whether it is tested, what remote viewing is set up, whether signage and a policy are included, and what the support arrangement is afterwards.

If one quote is noticeably lower, one of those lines will explain it, and it is almost always cabling, storage or paperwork. Once you have found the line, you can ask that installer to quote it properly, and then you are comparing three versions of the same job rather than three different ones.

Then ask for a fixed price after a site walk rather than an estimate from a phone call. We quote that way on every job, and the figure we give is the figure on the invoice. The full picture of what a system includes, how we handle licensing conditions and the different system types is on our commercial CCTV installation page.