Ask five installers what a CCTV system costs and you will get five numbers, all of them useless until someone has seen your site. That is not evasion — it is because the camera is often the cheapest part of the job.
This is what actually decides the figure on your quotation, so you can read one properly and compare two of them fairly.
1. Camera count, not camera price
People shop for cameras. Installers price coverage. A shop with one long counter and a single entrance may need three cameras; the same floor area split into aisles and a back store may need eight. The way your space is divided matters more than its size.
Be wary of a quote that names a camera count before anyone has walked your site. It is a guess, and the correction usually arrives after the work has started.
2. The cable run is the hidden cost
Cameras are cheap to buy and expensive to reach. A camera on the far corner of a warehouse needs cable, conduit, and someone on a ladder for an hour. A camera two metres from the recorder needs none of that.
- False ceiling with an accessible route — cheapest
- Surface conduit on a finished wall — moderate, and visible
- Chasing into a completed structure — most expensive, and messy
- Across a compound or between buildings — needs trenching or a wireless link
This is also where cheap quotes cut corners. Thin cable, no conduit outdoors, joints taped instead of terminated — it works on handover day and fails in the first monsoon.
3. Recording and how long you keep it
The recorder and hard disk are sized by two things: how many cameras feed into them, and how many days of footage you want to keep. Retention is the part people underestimate.
Fifteen days sounds like plenty until a stock discrepancy surfaces three weeks later and the footage has already been overwritten. Decide the retention period before the recorder is bought, not after — retrofitting storage is more expensive than specifying it once.
4. HD or IP
Analog HD runs on coaxial cable and is the economical route for smaller sites. IP runs on network cable, gives higher resolution, and scales more gracefully across floors or branches. IP costs more per camera and usually needs a switch and structured cabling behind it.
If you need to read a number plate or identify a face rather than just see that someone was there, that requirement decides the resolution, and the resolution decides the architecture.
5. The parts that get left off cheap quotes
- Power supply and backup — cameras go blind in a power cut without it
- Outdoor-rated cabling and proper conduit
- Mounting hardware, junction boxes and weatherproof terminations
- Remote-view setup and configuration on your phone
- Handover training so your staff can actually pull footage
- Warranty terms and what AMC covers afterwards
When one quote is noticeably cheaper than another, this list is usually where the difference lives. Ask for it line by line.
How to compare two quotations properly
- Same camera count and same positions on both
- Camera type and resolution stated, not just "HD camera"
- Recorder model and disk size written down
- Retention period in days, in writing
- Cable type and whether conduit is included
- What happens in year two — warranty and AMC terms
A quotation that answers all six is comparable. One that says "8 cameras + DVR + installation — lump sum" is not, no matter how attractive the number looks.
The honest summary
A survey costs nothing and removes the guesswork. Any installer worth using will walk the site, map the coverage, and give you a written quotation you can hold them to. If someone quotes without seeing the place, that tells you something about how the rest of the job will go.