Restaurants & bars
Front of house, kitchen, walk-in cooler, alley exit, parking. POS-tied recording on registers. Walk-in temperature alerts to your phone.
Who Advanced is for
If you have multiple zones to cover, mixed indoor + outdoor exposure, or compliance/insurance requirements that ask for documented retention, Advanced is the package most small businesses settle on.
Repair shops & storefronts
Bay-by-bay coverage, parts room, customer waiting area, parking lot perimeter. Tamper detection on outdoor cameras facing the lot.
Multi-room facilities
Salons with multiple stations, dental offices with multiple operatories, daycare centers, churches with classrooms. Per-zone motion alerts.
What Advanced adds beyond Basic
- 5–16 PoE IP cameras with mixed wide + medium FOV. Outdoor models with IP66 rating and color-at-night.
- 30-day retention on a redundant 8TB+ drive setup (RAID-1 mirror or single 12TB depending on the NVR).
- Isolated VLAN — cameras on their own subnet, segmented from your guest Wi-Fi and POS network. Reduces blast-radius if a guest device is compromised.
- Perimeter + tamper detection — the system alerts when a camera is moved, covered, or loses signal.
- Continuous off-site sync — not just the index, the actual clips for the last 7 days, to a destination you control (cloud bucket or off-site NAS).
- UPS on the NVR — keeps recording through 30-minute outages. Sized for the camera load + 50% headroom.
- Quarterly drift report — emailed PDF: which cameras have drifted off their assigned zone, which need a clean, which are showing degraded image quality.
- Multi-user access — per-employee logins so you can revoke a leaving staff member without re-provisioning everyone.
Spec sheet
| Item | What you get |
|---|---|
| Cameras | 5–16 PoE IP cameras, mix of 4MP and 8MP. Indoor + outdoor with appropriate housing. |
| NVR | 16-channel NVR with RAID-1 8TB or 12TB single drive. Hot-swap bays. |
| Network | Dedicated PoE switch, isolated VLAN, optional firewall rule limiting camera traffic. |
| Recording depth | 30 days at 4MP continuous + 60+ days motion-triggered. |
| Off-site sync | Last 7 days of clips synced continuously. Index synced for older clips. |
| Mobile access | Native NVR mobile app + optional self-hosted mobile portal on your domain. |
| Power resilience | UPS included. Auto-shutdown protected. |
| Reporting | Quarterly drift report PDF, monthly health summary email. |
| Warranty | 90-day workmanship + manufacturer warranty pass-through. |
Pricing notes
How quotes work: Advanced is fixed-price after a 60-minute site walk + a small drawing of camera positions. Most Advanced quotes land between $4,800 and $9,500 depending on camera count, cabling difficulty, and whether you need cellular failover for a site with weekly ISP outages.
- Hardware at cost + 12% markup on average. Itemized in the quote so you can verify.
- Off-site sync destination can be a Backblaze B2 bucket (~$5/TB/month, billed direct to you), an off-site NAS at a partner location, or your own cloud account.
- 30-day post-launch support included. Optional retainer ($95/hr or month-rate) after that.
- Verified nonprofit code TCG26FREE applies to design + labor for the first install. Hardware not included.
Common questions about Advanced
Can I integrate my POS with the cameras?
Yes. Most modern POS systems (Square, Toast, Clover, Lightspeed) can post a webhook on each transaction. The NVR records the clip with the transaction ID embedded so you can search "show me the camera clip for the void at 8:42 pm." See the Custom tier for the full integration treatment.
What about cellular failover for outage-prone locations?
Advanced supports a 4G/5G failover modem ($45-90/month subscription). The cameras keep recording locally even with no internet; cellular kicks in only for off-site sync and remote viewing.
Can I add AI vision to an Advanced system later?
Yes. The AI Integration tier is an add-on layer that works on top of any Basic, Advanced, or Custom install.
How much downtime during install?
For a typical Advanced install (10 cameras, single-floor building) the disruptive part is roughly 1 day of cable runs + a half-day of NVR config. Cabling can be done outside business hours if needed. The previous system stays running until cutover.