Most national providers lease you a system as part of a monitoring agreement. Most independent installers sell you one outright. The equipment can look similar on paper. What differs is ownership, and ownership has consequences that surface later.
What you own when you buy
Under a purchase, the cameras, cabling and recorder are yours once the work is complete and paid for. Under a lease they generally are not, which becomes relevant at exactly the moments you would rather it did not: changing provider, selling the building, or deciding to stop paying.
The five-year number
A lease usually presents a lower figure up front and a monthly cost per camera. The comparison that matters is total cost across the life of the system.
Multiply the monthly by sixty, add the installation charge, and compare that against an outright purchase. On most commercial systems the purchase is substantially cheaper over that period. On some small systems it is closer than people expect, which is worth knowing too.
Who is allowed to service the system
This is the consequence people discover late. Leased systems are often built on proprietary hardware only the provider can service, which means one possible price for every future change: an extra camera, a repositioned one, a replacement after damage.
An open system built on standard hardware can be serviced by anyone competent, including whoever you choose after us. That is not a small thing over a decade.
What happens if you stop paying
Under a lease, access to your own recorded footage can depend on the account being current. That is worth understanding before an incident rather than during one, and it is rarely the headline of the agreement.
What happens when you move
Owned equipment can, within reason, be removed and reinstalled, and it forms part of what you are selling with a building. Leased equipment generally cannot and does not, and the agreement may continue past the move.
Where leasing genuinely makes sense
Where monitoring is the actual product. If you need somebody watching and dispatching, that is a service with real ongoing cost, and paying monthly for it is entirely reasonable. We will say so where that is the right answer for a property.
What is less reasonable is paying monthly, indefinitely, for hardware you will never own, cannot move and cannot have serviced by anyone else, just to get a monitoring service that could have been bought separately.
The three questions that settle buying versus leasing
What do I own at the end. What does it cost to leave. Who else can service this system.
The answers are usually short, and they usually decide the matter without needing a spreadsheet.
With Elite Security you own the system outright, which removes most of the questions above before they arise. More like this in the blog, and commercial CCTV is where to start.