You might be considering to secure your home with a traditional alarm service. Here’s how Alarmhandler can offer more value for money:
- Many alarm services use specialized alarm hardware that they install and service for you as long as you’re a subscriber. You might pay a signup fee, but that does not cover the full equipment and installation cost. Instead you pay for the equipment and installation as part of your monthly subscription fee. If you’re a subscriber for a long period, you effectively pay the alarm many times over. If you cancel the subscription, the alarm is dismantled by the alarm company leaving you with nothing. With Alarmhandler you purchase your own inexpensive and maintenance free IP cameras, and if you cancel your subscription, you still own them and can use them with another online service.
- For private customers, most alarm services send out a security guard to check on alarms on a best effort Service Level Agreement (SLA). This means that business alarm customers that typically have a time specific SLA will get serviced before you, as the alarm company will be penalized if they use long time to respond. With Alarmhandler, we’ve also gone for best effort response, but instead of basing it on expensive paid security guards, the inhabitants or neighbours constitute the response team. This means that there is no guaranteed response time, but if anyone you have given access to the app can see something is not right using the recordings, and they are nearby, they can check up on your estate and alert police or fire brigade in minutes. This is almost never possible with paid security guards that have large areas to cover!
- For most alarm services, traditional magnet contacts are mounted on doors/windows and infrared sensors are used to monitor space inside your estate. This is stable and well-known technology, but if you want to validate alarms and check video recordings, you need to purchase additional photo sensors working with the other alarm hardware – and pay a premium monthly charge per photo sensor added. With Alarmhandler, we use inexpensive IP cameras not only as sensors but also for recording during events. And no extra charge!
- Many alarm services charge you extra per month if you add more sensors, Alarmhandler has a flat monthly fee as long as you respect our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)
