The purchase price of a security system is usually a minority of what it costs over its working life. Total cost of ownership is what actually determines whether a system was a good investment.
Beyond capital cost, the recurring costs that dominate total cost of ownership are maintenance contracts, software licensing and support renewals, storage growth for video retention, and the eventual cost of technology refresh when a platform reaches end-of-life.
Integration effort is a cost that is easy to underestimate at procurement time and expensive to discover later — a platform that is cheaper to buy but requires custom middleware to talk to the rest of the environment can easily cost more over five years than a more expensive, natively-integrable alternative.
A useful TCO comparison models cost over the system’s expected service life — typically seven to ten years for core infrastructure — not just the first year, and includes a realistic estimate of at least one mid-life technology refresh.