About the calculator

The HTS Video Surveillance TCO Calculator is a free, public, vendor-neutral tool that compares manufacturer suggested retail prices (MSRPs), license terms, warranty terms, storage costs, install labor, IT labor, and hardware refresh cycles for cameras and NVRs from 15 vendors, side by side, so that a CFO, an IT director, or a facilities director can see the real 10-year cost of a security camera system before signing a quote.

What it does

  • Compares 5-year and 10-year TCO across 15 enterprise video surveillance vendors
  • Runs an 8-cost-category framework (field devices, install, licenses, storage, IT labor, maintenance, server room, decommissioning)
  • Applies a deterministic 12-rule recommendation chain — the first rule to fire wins, no LLM, no hidden bias
  • Surfaces 5 cross-vendor differentiators (warranty asymmetry, license traps, end-of-sale) that most calculators miss
  • Footnotes every line item to a public source with a last-verified date and a confidence rating
  • Encodes the full input form into a shareable URL (base64 in ?d=) so colleagues see the same comparison

What it does not do

  • It does not ingest live vendor prices. All prices are stored in the data plane and refreshed on a quarterly curated cadence (every 90 days). There is no live API call to a vendor's pricing system.
  • It does not include IPVM, Gartner, or other paywalled analysis. Those sources are excluded by the CI gate.
  • It does not use a large language model to generate recommendations. The recommendation engine is deterministic rules. The "Why this recommendation?" text is templated, not generated.
  • It does not calculate ROI benefits (the financial value of incidents prevented, theft reduction, liability reduction). A separate ROI benefits module is planned for v1.5.
  • It does not support multi-currency. The calculator is USD-only.
  • It does not read from the HTS product database. HTS partner costs, margins, and negotiated rates live in a separate, role-restricted schema. The calculator's service principal has no read access.

How to verify the math

  1. Click any line item in the TCO breakdown. The footnote popover shows the source URL, source type, last-verified date, and confidence rating.
  2. Read the full footnote registry. The 23 assumptions in the TCO model are listed in the public repository with their source URL, source type, last-verified date, confidence rating, and any notes. A buyer can read it in 15 minutes.
  3. Read the source. Each assumption links to a public web page — vendor-published, public-sector, or vendor-neutral, and non-paywalled.
  4. Report an error. Email calculator@hts.pro with the line item, the source you checked, and the corrected value. We reply within five business days.

Update cadence

The data plane is refreshed on a quarterly curated cadence: every 90 days, the HTS research team re-verifies every MSRP, every license term, and every warranty term against the vendor's current public pricing page. The CI gate fails the build on any row whose last_verified date is more than 180 days old.

The next planned refresh is 2026-11-08. The previous refresh was 2026-08-08.

HTS disclaimer

The calculator is provided "as is" without any warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. HTS does not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or currency of the output and is not liable for any reliance on it. The full disclaimer and nominative fair use notice is on thelegal page.

HTS is a partner of several vendors included in the calculator. The calculator's recommendation engine does not know that. The recommendation engine applies the same 12 deterministic rules to every vendor. HTS does not see HTS partner cost, margin, or negotiated rate data when generating the comparison; that data lives in a separate, role-restricted database.