SecurityCamStoreBy Bay Geeks · Since 2004
There is no honest single number, but there is an honest structure: five line items, a handful of things that move each one, and a walk-through that turns it into a written quote. Here is what goes into the price, so you can read any quote you get, including ours.
The short answer: a small-business system is priced as cameras plus a recorder plus storage plus cable plus labor, and the number that moves the total most is how many cameras you actually need, followed by how hard each one is to get a cable to. Cortex equipment is quoted per system rather than listed with a price, and Bay Geeks quotes installation per project after a site walk, so the way to a firm number is a fifteen-minute walk-through. Everything below is how to think about it before that.
The biggest line and the one you control. Most small businesses in our experience land between four and eight cameras: customer entrance, staff or delivery door, the register or reception, the stockroom, and one or two on the parking area. Resolution, lens and features move the per-camera price: a 5MP fixed-lens turret is the workhorse; motorized-zoom, ColorMAX night color, and license-plate cameras cost more and earn it only in specific spots. Our guide to counting cameras is the best money-saver on this page.
An NVR (for IP cameras) or hybrid DVR (for coax) sized one step above your camera count, so adding a camera later means buying a camera, not a recorder. Sixteen-channel recorders are the common small-business choice for that reason even when the day-one count is six.
A surveillance-rated hard drive sized for how many days you want to keep. Thirty days is the usual business target; some insurers, landlords and industries want more. Higher resolution and more cameras eat drive space faster, so storage is quoted alongside the camera list, not guessed.
Cat6 for PoE cameras, or the existing coax if you are upgrading an older system. Cable is cheap per foot; the cost is in running it, which is the next line.
Installation is quoted per project, and what moves it is almost entirely how hard each camera is to reach. A drop-ceiling office with the recorder in the same room is the easy end. A block building with a camera on a parking-lot light pole, or an attic run in August, is the other end. Count the cameras, then count the hard ones.
No monthly fee for recording, playback, or remote viewing: footage lives on your recorder, at your property. No cloud subscription. No per-camera licensing for the basic analytics on Cortex cameras. The system is yours the day it goes in, which is the whole argument for owning one outright; we wrote about the five-year math separately.
Four to eight 5MP cameras, mostly fixed turrets with one ColorMAX model where the parking lot is dark, a 16-channel PoE NVR with a surveillance drive sized for thirty days, Cat6 runs, and a half-day to a day of installation depending on the building. That is the shape of most quotes we write; the number on the bottom depends on your building.
Tell us what you're covering and tick the installation box, or call 727-579-4335. If you need fewer cameras than you were planning on, we'll say so; it happens more often than the other way round.