Determining monthly costs
Often people ask me how much does it cost to monitor my security system.
The quick answer is between $30 and $70 dollars for a normal system. An average monitoring cost per month is $45.00.
There are several factors to consider when making this determination:
Is the system using an analog phone line to send signals? When the answer is yes our monitoring cost will be lower around ($30/mo) although you will pay the phone company much more for the phone line per month than you would by changing to a cellular or radio.
Do you need any additional services such as:
The ability to arm and disarm remotely, we call this elite control cellular ($15/mo) this means we need to add a cellular to your alarm system and if the panel is outdated or too old often we need to upgrade the motherboard inside the control panel in order to do this.
Radio service ($15/mo) this will not allow remote arm and disarm but the AES radio is a very secure and reliable way to monitor your systems to stay away from phone lines that can be cut or stop working.
Fire Alarm cellular service or radio service normally adds ( $22/mo) to the monitoring cost and with fire alarm this is high supervision and sends a signal every hour that is why the cellular costs an additional $7 more than the normal cellular.
Opening and Closing reports ($5/mo), This tells you who disarmed and who armed and at what time. If you have elite control it gives you limited reports but if you are in a commercial facility it is still prudent to consider these additional reports.
Web Access ($5/mo) This allows you to get on a web site and view all the activity on your account.
Schedules where dispatch notifies you of your employees opening up too early, closing the facility too late or not arming the system at all. ($10/mo) One of my customers is a tanning salon and we called him to inform him that his employee was disarming at 2AM and he caught his employee inviting all their friends to tan in the middle of the night.
Lock Control, temperature control,lighting control or garage door control ($4/mo each service) to remotely open your doors.
Camera control ($10/mo for 1-4 cameras + $8/mo for the recorder to be connected through the cellular) I personally do not like the wireless cameras that communicate over the internet near as much as I like the hardwired cameras and the hardwired systems do not require a monthly fee.
Elevator monitoring ($15/mo per elevator) These are also monitored with an analog phone line and these are going away so we have a solution to install a cellular unit for each elevator and that monitoring is ($50/mo each elevator)
Alarm response ($10/mo) where in certain areas of the state one of our uniformed guards in a marked car will respond and check the perimeter of your property for signs of break in and if there is a breach they will call and wait for the police.
Key response is ($20/mo where the guard will enter your property and check inside, often in Park City and Deer valley customers will want this service so when a temperature sensor goes off we will go check to see if the heater/furnace has failed and we will notify the proper people to get it up and working again according to the customers instructions..
UL or UL2050 monitoring which is a higher security level has additional costs and requirements so those will e dealt with on an individual basis.
Fire Alarm or scheduled security inspections. This is figured up depending on how many point you have, code and State law require this for a commercial system and for residential it is required to monitor your flow switch tied to the alarm system and it is prudent to have it inspected. Many insurance companies have their own requirements..
When we have a system where we divide the areas up so keypads will arm and disarm those areas separately like a strip mall area where there are 5 different stores all on the same system we add ($12/mo per area that has separate call lists) If they are all the same call list there is not an additional charge per month.
Text or email ($5/mo) on systems that do not have elite control, with elite you can set your system up to send you alerts.
Repair agreement or extended warranty. On new systems we offer this and normally it is around $1 per point but let me figure the cost for you on each project since pricing varies continually. This would cover equipment that stops working but does not cover acts of God or vandalism. This does cover batteries and most companies do not cover batteries with their repair agreement.
Managed access where Peak Alarm will manage your access control card system adding and deleting access as needed ($35/mo for up to 100 cards). This depends on the type of access system that you have an if we can remotely connect to it or not. Most of the time we will just train someone in your office to manage your system.
Keep in mind that each Peak Alarm salesperson can bundle their monthly monitoring costs differently and one example would be that a person wants to pay less for the installation so they want to pay more per month so the monitoring may be higher for that person than it would normally in order to lower the overall installation cost.
Call Larry at (801) 428 1384 or on his cell (801) 898 6003 to get current pricing because this list gives you an idea of how we figure up the pricing. When you have more than one service we can bundle and lower the price of some of the services to make the overall cost lower.
When you want to sign a month to month, 12 month or 24 month agreement instead of a 36 month the ability to keep your installation price lower is not what it is with a 36 month agreement where we can subsidize part of the install cost.
There are out of state companies that offer lower monitoring costs although look up their Better Business Bureau reports and their Consumer affairs reports because there are issue with some of these companies that you will want to know about before hand.
We currently have the senior citizen monitoring lock in rate which most companies do not have. My mother when she remarried was paying $72 per month for normal phone line monitoring and I was able to lower her rate into the twenties but the other company did not want to cancel even though they were out of contract.
Peak Alarm has a UL listed Central Station that is Local and in the event of an emergency all account monitoring will be transferred off site. This station is also 5 Diamond certified which is a very rare things to have a Central Station hold both certifications.