A shop or an office is not a different kind of alarm.
It is the same panel, the same app and the same 24/7 monitoring as a house, on the same published prices — from $14.99 the first year on Universal Communicator. What a business usually wants on top of that is on this page: operators who actually watch the cameras, and the monitoring station holding your opening hours.
The two things the station does for a business
Neither is an Alarm.com plan and neither is in a monthly plan price. Lanvac bills them per account, so we quote them per account and they are named on your quote rather than folded into a headline number. Add either one on any plan — tell us the premises is a shop, office or yard when you ask for a quote and they are priced on it, named as their own lines rather than folded into a headline number.
- Open / close reporting — $9.99 a month. The station holds your hours. Someone disarms before you open, or the site is still unarmed after you should have closed, and an operator calls your list.
- Fail-to-open alerts — $19.99 a month. Nobody opens on time, so the station phones to find out why — roughly fifteen minutes after the opening time you gave us.
Hours changed, or closing for a holiday? Tell us here and we pass it to the station. Nothing changes until we confirm it back to you.
Silent clip — Alarm.com supplies these without audio.
Remote Video Monitoring
A camera that records an intruder tells you what happened afterwards. Remote Video Monitoring puts a person on the other end of it while it is happening — an operator who can see the yard, talk to whoever is standing in it, turn the lights on and call the police, at three in the morning, from the same station that watches your alarm.
- Detect Your cameras’ analytics spot a person or vehicle where there should not be one, on the schedule you set — and you choose which cameras are enrolled, one by one
- Assess A monitoring operator sees the clip and 15 minutes either side of it in the RVM Console, and can open Live View
- Deter Two-way talk-down on supported cameras and manually triggered warning sounds, to move someone along before anything happens
- Act Property actions: unlock a door or turn on lights to guide responders, or escalate to police when it is real
- Control Arm and disarm cameras from the app, cancel a false alert before it escalates, and see every operator action in your activity feed
Quoted per site on camera count and the hours you want watched. It runs on the same Alarm.com cameras and video plans as everything else on this site — there is nothing separate to buy into.
Nobody gets sent to your site until we've tried to reach you.
An alarm signal does not put anyone in a vehicle on its own. The station calls your premises first and lets it ring six or seven times — answer, give your passcode, and it ends there, which is how most of them end. If nobody answers, or the passcode is wrong, what happens next is whatever your account says. Your keyholders are called after that, to attend and to be told what is already on its way.
- Signal received. The station has it within seconds.
- The operator calls your premises. Six or seven rings, and the alert lands in your app. Answer with your passcode, or cancel it in the app, and it ends there — most do.
- No answer, or the wrong passcode. Now what happens is whatever your account says — the three below.
- Then your keyholders are called, in the order you set, so somebody can attend — and the alarm is held open for updates. That call is to tell them what is already on its way, not a second chance to call it off.
If nobody can be reached, there are three ways it can go — you choose
average, per callout, set by the guard company
- A uniformed guard in a marked vehicle attends and checks the property
- Finds nothing wrong — police are never dispatched, so no fee and nothing on your record
- Finds something real — police attend a verified incident, not another alarm bell
- Charged only when a guard is actually sent
plus tax, per occurrence, set by City of Ottawa by-law
- Charged to the registration holder every time police attend a false alarm
- Recorded against the address under the False Alarm Reduction By-law
- Repeat occurrences are how a property loses police response altogether
no callout, no fee — nobody is sent
- Fully monitored — every signal is handled by the station
- Your whole contact list is called and your main emergency contacts are messaged
- Nothing is ever dispatched — the alert and nothing else
- Optional backstop: more than two alarm signals and nobody reachable gets called in — set the threshold, or turn it off
About those two prices — read this part. Neither service is ours. Guard response is provided by a licensed guard company and dispatched through the monitoring station; the police fee is set by City of Ottawa by-law. We do not set either price and both can change without notice. The $80 is an average — it varies by guard company, time of day and location. The $180 is the current by-law fee, plus applicable taxes. Both are shown here so you can weigh the decision, not as a quote. Guard response is an optional add-on, charged per occurrence, never included in a monthly plan, and we go through the current rate with you before it is added to your account. A guard attends, observes and reports — they are not police officers and do not intervene.
Residential plans and packages are on the main plans page, and the cost comparison is under Compare quotes. Cameras for a business site are the same hardware we fit in homes.