About the business
I run a training company with two small sites and no IT team.
The problem
One quote had a low first cost and yearly fees. The other had a high first cost and low yearly fees.
I went looking online for which was cheaper, and found numbers everywhere that didn't agree. One installer claimed a huge five-year gap. One cloud vendor listed two very different monthly fees per door on the same site. Break-even estimates ranged from a few years to never, depending on who'd written them.
I couldn't trust any single figure.
What we did
I asked both vendors to fill in the same table for five years: same doors, same users, with hardware, labor, licenses, integrations, support and yearly fees each on a separate line.
I also asked what happens when the internet goes down. One cloud vendor says its doors keep making decisions locally, but adding a credential or starting a lockdown waits until the connection is back.
Both vendors answered in writing.
The result
With two sites and no IT staff, remote management won, and I knew the yearly fee before I signed.
A company with one big site and its own IT team might reasonably choose the other way. The table made it my decision, not a sales one.
The same line-by-line approach works on any quote. Here's how one firm read theirs.
Comparing a cloud quote with an on-premise one? Send us both. We'll put them in the same five-year table so you can see the real difference.
Free door-by-door access review
Send us your door list, or just tell us what's behind each door. We'll reply with the weak spots and what to fix first, cheapest first.
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