Cheap should mean lower price — not less software
What a low-cost guard tour system should still include, what to check before you buy, and why £60 a month is a sustainable price rather than a loss-leader.
Why guard tour software gets expensive
The standard model in this sector is per guard, per month. It sounds reasonable on a demo call — "just £5 an officer" — and it is fine when you have eight guards. Then you win a contract, take on twenty more, and your software bill goes up by £100 a month before you have invoiced a penny of the new work.
Layer on the usual extras and the picture gets worse: a setup fee, scheduling sold as a separate module, a charge per site, extra admin logins billed individually, and tags you can only buy from the vendor. A thirty-guard company can easily be paying £250 a month for something it uses for four things.
What we charge instead
£60 a month, up to 40 guards. £100 a month, up to 100. Every feature, unlimited sites, unlimited checkpoints, unlimited office users, setup and training included, cancel any time. The full pricing page is here.
What a per-guard price really costs you
Illustrative comparison against a typical £5 per guard, per month licence with a £250 setup fee, spread over the first year.
| Your team | Typical per-guard licence | SMS-Patrol | First-year difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 guards | £50/mo + £250 setup | £60/mo, no setup | £130 less |
| 20 guards | £100/mo + £250 setup | £60/mo, no setup | £730 less |
| 30 guards | £150/mo + £250 setup | £60/mo, no setup | £1,330 less |
| 40 guards | £200/mo + £250 setup | £60/mo, no setup | £1,930 less |
| 70 guards | £350/mo + £250 setup | £100/mo, no setup | £3,250 less |
| 100 guards | £500/mo + £250 setup | £100/mo, no setup | £5,050 less |
Illustrative only — competitor pricing varies and is often negotiated. Use it as a prompt to ask any vendor for their twelve-month total at your headcount, in writing.
What a cheap system must still do
If a low-cost option fails any of these, the saving is not real.
Real-time visibility
If you can only see where guards were after the shift, you cannot fix anything while it matters.
Read moreNon-proprietary checkpoints
Standard NFC tags and printed QR codes. If you can only buy tags from the vendor, you are not really paying the headline price.
Read moreReports you can send a client
Exportable PDF and Excel. Reporting is the part your customer sees, so it should not be a paid add-on.
Scheduling in the base price
Rotas and guard tour belong in the same system. Buying them separately costs more and creates double entry.
Read moreLone worker cover
SOS and check-in timers are a duty-of-care matter, not a premium feature.
Read moreOffline capability
Dead spots are ordinary on UK sites. Scans must queue and sync, not vanish.
Support you can reach
A person on the phone in your own time zone, included in the price.
Your data, exportable
You should be able to leave with your history. If you cannot export, you are locked in regardless of price.
No contract trap
A twelve-month tie-in on cheap software is still a twelve-month tie-in.
How we keep the price at £60 without cutting the product
Fair question. Here is the honest answer.
We are small and we sell directly
No sales floor, no channel partners, no conference stands. You will speak to people who work on the product. That is a large fixed cost that simply is not in our price.
We do not sell hardware
No proprietary tags, no readers, no docking stations, no logistics operation. Your officers' phones and standard NFC tags do the job perfectly well.
We built one product properly instead of ten features badly
SMS-Patrol does guard tour, tracking, rotas, incidents and billing. It does not attempt HR, recruitment, vetting, e-learning and CRM. Focus is cheaper to build and much cheaper to support.
Flat pricing is cheaper for us too
Per-seat billing needs metering, reconciliation and monthly true-ups. One price per company means less admin on both sides — you get a predictable bill and we get a predictable business.
Questions about low-cost guard tour software
SMS-Patrol starts at £60 per month for up to 40 guards, which works out at roughly £1.50 per officer. Most UK guard tour systems price per guard per month, typically somewhere between £3 and £8 each, plus setup. Always compare the total monthly bill for your actual headcount rather than the headline rate.
It depends entirely on why it is cheap. Cheap because the vendor cut features you need, or ships an app your guards cannot use, is false economy. Cheap because they price flat rather than per guard, do not sell proprietary hardware and do not employ a large sales team is simply a different business model.
There are free tiers, and they are usually capped at a handful of guards or a single site, with reports and exports held back. They are fine for trying the idea out. For a company with real clients and real contracts, the missing piece is normally the reporting — which is the part your customer actually pays for.
Setup and onboarding fees, per-site charges, minimum contract terms, charges for extra admin users, paid training, per-report or per-export fees, proprietary tags you can only buy from the vendor, and price rises at renewal. Ask for the twelve-month total in writing before comparing anything.
It can, and that is worth checking specifically. Ask who answers the phone, in what hours, and how quickly. Our support is UK-based, included in the price, and reachable by phone, email and WhatsApp Monday to Friday.
Yes, and it is less painful than most people expect. Export your sites, checkpoints and officers from the old system, and we will import them. Most companies run both in parallel for a week and then stop paying the old one.