What does it really cost to monitor your building's cameras?

Watching cameras looks cheap - the cameras are already paid for, and someone is already sitting at the desk. But monitoring, done properly, is one of the most expensive line items in a building, and most committees have never actually priced it.

Do the maths on human eyes

One person can meaningfully watch about 8 to 10 camera tiles at once before the rest become wallpaper. Cover the feeds around the clock and you need three shifts a day, plus relief for breaks, leave and sickness. For a mid-size community that is several people just for monitoring - typically 30,000 to 50,000 AED a month - before the cameras have done anything clever at all.

And you are paying a premium for attention that fades. Research on control-room vigilance is brutally consistent: after about twenty minutes of staring at a video grid, a human misses most of what crosses it. You are buying eyes that get tired, look away, and go home.

The costs that never reach the invoice

The salary line is only the visible part. Guard turnover means constant hiring and re-training. Sick days and no-shows leave blind windows exactly when you are paying for cover. And every incident that slips through - the theft, the fall found too late, the dispute that escalated - carries a cost of its own, in money and in trust. None of it shows up on the monitoring invoice, and all of it is real.

The same cameras, watched properly, for a fraction

Awera watches every feed, every second, and never gets bored. It only pulls a human in when something actually happens - a real alert, with the clip attached. The cost lands at a fraction of a single guard's salary, and the attention never dips at 3am.

You are not choosing between security and savings. You are choosing between paying a lot for attention that fades, and paying a little for attention that does not.

Want the number for your building? The pricing calculator on our home page does the maths per camera, and a free camera-health audit gives you an exact figure.