- Home
- Guides & blog
- Pricing
What guard tour software really costs in the UK
Per-guard licences, setup fees, module pricing and tag lock-in — how to work out the true twelve-month number before you sign.
Guard tour software pricing in the UK is unhelpfully opaque. Most vendors will not publish a figure, quotes vary by a factor of five for what looks like the same product, and the number you are given on the call is rarely the number you end up paying. Here is how to work out the real cost.
The four pricing models you will meet
Per guard, per month
The most common model, usually somewhere between £3 and £8 per officer. It sounds modest and scales badly: at £5 a head, thirty officers is £150 a month, and every contract you win increases your software bill before you have invoiced the work.
Watch for how they count seasonal and casual staff. Some vendors bill on the peak number of officers who touched the system in a month, which makes a busy event weekend surprisingly expensive.
Per site
Less common, and brutal for mobile patrol firms — a company visiting forty sites a night pays forty times over for the same handful of officers. If you run mobile patrol, avoid this model entirely.
Tiered by module
Guard tour in the base package, scheduling as an add-on, invoicing as another, reporting API as a third. Individually each looks cheap; together they are often double the headline figure. Insist on a quote for the complete set of things you will actually use.
Flat, per company
One price covering everything, regardless of headcount within a band. Predictable, and it does not punish growth. This is what we do: £60 a month up to 40 guards, £100 up to 100.
The costs that are not in the monthly figure
- Setup / onboarding fee — commonly £150–£500. Ask for it to be waived; it usually can be.
- Training — sometimes charged per session, sometimes per person. Ask whether it is included and whether it covers new starters in a year's time.
- Extra admin users — some vendors charge per office login. If you have four supervisors and a controller, that adds up.
- Proprietary tags — the real trap. Marked-up checkpoint tags you can only buy from the vendor, recurring every time one is lost or a new site is fitted.
- Support — check whether phone support is included or is a paid tier.
- Data export — occasionally charged. Worth asking about before you need it.
- Renewal uplift — the year-two price. Ask now, in writing.
Working out your real number
Take any quote and calculate this:
Do this for every vendor on your shortlist. The ranking usually changes, and it frequently changes a lot. A £3 per-guard system with a £400 setup fee and paid scheduling can easily beat a £6 per-guard all-inclusive one at ten officers and lose badly at fifty.
A worked example
A company with 35 officers, growing to 50 within the year:
| Cost line | Typical per-guard vendor | SMS-Patrol |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly licence (35 → 50 guards) | £175 → £250 | £60 → £100 |
| Setup fee | £250 | £0 |
| Scheduling module | £40/month | Included |
| 5 extra admin users | £25/month | Included |
| Approximate first year | ~£3,500 | ~£1,000 |
Illustrative figures based on commonly quoted UK rates. Vendor pricing varies and is often negotiable — use this as a template for your own comparison rather than as a quote.
When paying more is the right call
To be fair about it: there are situations where an expensive platform is genuinely the better buy. If you need BS 7858 screening workflows, certified alarm receiving centre integration, full in-house payroll, or an implementation team for five hundred officers across several countries, buy the enterprise product. The cost is real but so is the capability.
What is not worth paying for is enterprise pricing on a system you use for four things. Most security companies use guard tour software to prove patrols, run the rota, log incidents and bill accurately. If that is you, the ceiling on what this should cost is a lot lower than the market implies.
Our pricing is on the website, and here is what we think low-cost should still include.
Related questions
For a company under 40 officers, anywhere between £50 and £200 a month all-in is normal. Above that you are usually paying for enterprise features you will not use. SMS-Patrol is £60 a month for up to 40 guards.
They are common, typically £150 to £500, and they are almost always negotiable. Configuring your first site is a couple of hours of somebody's time — it is a sales lever more than a genuine cost.
Usually, by roughly 10–20%. It is worth taking once you are confident in the system, but not in month one — pay monthly until you know it works for your operation.