On 1 October 2025 Bell handed its home and business security customers to a.p.i. ALARM Inc. You did not choose a.p.i. You were moved. That is worth knowing, because it also means nothing is stopping you choosing somebody else — and in most cases you can keep the equipment on your wall.
Bell stopped taking new security orders on 7 August 2025 and serviced existing accounts until 30 September. From 1 October 2025 the accounts, the monitoring and the billing moved to a.p.i. ALARM. Customers were told to open a.p.i.’s app with their existing sign-in. Bell’s own support pages for Smart Home now answer “we no longer offer support on this topic”, and bell.ca no longer sells home security at all.
Straight from Bell: the transition, the dates and the two-year rate hold are on Bell’s own business support page. We are not interpreting a rumour for you — go and read it.
Ask yourself: what happens when the hold ends?
Part of the deal was that monthly rates are held for two years after the transition. That puts the end of the hold around October 2027. A rate that is frozen is not a rate that is low — it is a rate somebody has agreed not to touch for a while. When the hold lifts, the price is whatever a.p.i. decides it is.
Here: every price we charge is published on this website — equipment, monthly, the lot. You will not have to ask what it costs, and there is no contract, so a price you do not like is a thirty-day problem rather than a three-year one.
Ask: what panel is actually in my closet?
Honest answer, and it splits two ways.
If Bell installed a DSC or Honeywell panel — common on older accounts, and on anything that came through AlarmForce — it usually stays. We add an Alarm.com communicator, keep your keypads and sensors, and the system carries on with us monitoring it.
If you have one of the proprietary all-in-one Bell or AlarmForce units, it is locked to that platform and will not run on anybody else’s monitoring. That needs a new panel. The wiring, and usually the hardwired door contacts, still get reused — it is not a start-again job, but it is not free either, and we would rather say so here than discover it in your hallway.
How to find out in a minute: send us a photo of the panel and of the keypad. We will tell you which of the two you have before you cancel anything. See the panels we can take over.
Ask a.p.i.: what term am I on, when does it end, and what does cancelling cost?
Whatever term you signed with Bell went across with the account. Get it in writing before you do anything, and give us the end date.
What we will tell you: if you are mid-term and the penalty is real, we will tell you to wait and we will diarise the date. We have said that to plenty of people. A customer who comes over in eight months having not been hustled is worth more to us than one who pays two companies at once.
Ours goes to Lanvac, a ULC-listed station, and has for twenty-five years. Fire, smoke, CO and medical dispatch are in the base rate at every price on this site — you pay for the detectors, not for the watching of them.
And the part nobody mentions: nothing is dispatched to your house until the station has tried you and worked through your contact list, the way you set it up. How dispatch works, and what a false alarm costs in Ottawa.
Send a photo of the panel. We tell you whether it stays or goes, and what it costs, in writing, before anything is ordered. You give a.p.i. notice on your terms. A technician attends, puts the system on our account, and you are on the Alarm.com app the same day.
No contract. Month to month, thirty days’ notice, and you own the equipment from the day it goes in. If we stop earning it, you leave.
Sources for the dates on this page: Bell’s own business support notice on the a.p.i. ALARM transition, and BCE’s second-quarter 2025 results release announcing the agreement to sell the home security and monitored alarm assets. We have deliberately not repeated the deal value that is circulating on competitors’ blogs — BCE did not disclose one. Accurate Security is not affiliated with Bell Canada or a.p.i. ALARM Inc.; both names are used here to describe whose service a reader already has.
We call you back within the next business day with a written quote — no pressure, and nothing is ordered until you say so.
