Straight answer: almost every CCTV installation quote you receive will be priced per camera, and the per-camera price is the least useful number in it. What separates a good installer from a bad one is what happens in month six, and none of that appears on the quotation.
We spend a lot of time on sites where cameras were installed by somebody else. The pattern is remarkably consistent: the system worked on handover day, and then it quietly decayed. Four cameras dark. A recorder nobody has the password for. A hard disk that filled up in 2024 and has been overwriting itself in a nine-day loop ever since.
None of that was caused by a bad camera. It was caused by choosing on price alone.
Ask who owns the password
This is the single most revealing question, and it takes ten seconds.
A surprising number of installers keep the recorder's admin credentials to themselves. It sounds like diligence. In practice it means you cannot change a setting, add a user, or let anybody else touch the system without going back to them — and if the relationship sours, or they simply stop answering, your footage is behind a door you do not have a key to.
You should own the admin password on day one, in writing. An installer who resists is telling you how the next three years will go.
Ask what a dead camera costs you in time
Cameras fail. Cables get cut by a JCB, a power supply dies, a lens fogs. This is normal and not a scandal.
What matters is the answer to: a camera goes dark on a Tuesday, when is somebody physically on site? Get it in hours, not adjectives. "Immediately" and "we're always available" are not answers. Forty-eight hours in writing beats "same day" spoken.
This is where a genuinely local installer usually beats a bigger name — most CCTV failures are physical, and physical problems need someone in a van.
Get cabling and power itemised separately
The camera is rarely the expensive part. Cable runs, conduit, mounting at height, and getting power to a pole at the far end of a compound are where the real cost and the real corner-cutting live.
Ask for cabling, power, mounting, the recorder, storage and support as separate lines. If a supplier will only give you one bundled number per camera, you cannot compare their quote to anyone else's — which is usually the point.
Ask what happens when the disk fills
Every recorder overwrites eventually. The question is when, and whether you were told.
Work out the retention you actually need — for most businesses that is thirty days, sometimes ninety if you are dealing with insurance or a regulator — and make the installer size the storage to hit it at the resolution and frame rate they are quoting. A system sold as "30 days" at a frame rate nobody mentioned can turn out to be nine.
Ask to see a site they installed over a year ago
Not a photograph of a fresh install. A live view, today, from something they commissioned more than twelve months back.
Anyone can hand over a working system on day one. Being able to show you one still working a year later is a different claim entirely, and it is the one that predicts your experience.
Ask what the cameras can actually do
There is a real difference between a camera that records and a system that tells someone. If you are being sold "AI" or "smart detection", ask precisely which events raise an alert, who receives it, and how the system avoids firing all night for cats and headlights.
Vague answers here are common because the feature is often a checkbox on the recorder that nobody has ever configured.
Ask who tunes it after handover
The install is not the job. The first two weeks are — detection zones, sensitivity, schedules, who gets which alert.
If nobody owns that period, you end up with the most common outcome in Indian CCTV: a technically functional system with every notification muted, because in week one it cried wolf and nobody went back to fix it.
The short version
Price per camera tells you almost nothing. Password ownership, response time in hours, itemised cabling, real retention, a year-old reference site, specific alert behaviour and a named owner for the tuning period tell you nearly everything.
Ask those seven, and the field usually narrows itself.