Cost model
There is a software company running inside most monitoring firms — a device fleet sized for the largest activation and paid for in the quietest year, a yard to stage it in, and a developer keeping pace with two operating systems a year. None of it is billable to a client.
This page is built for a firm already running a system of its own — the annual platform fee it quotes is for operations carrying more than $150,000 a year. If your numbers land below that, or you license someone else’s platform, Atlas is priced per project instead and the page will tell you so. Put your own numbers in below. Enter the figures you already know about your own operation; the structural assumptions are fixed, shown on the page, and explained where they sit. Nothing leaves your browser until you ask us for a quote.
Put your own numbers in
Most of these costs actually arrive monthly — the plan, the storage unit, the payroll run — so that is how they are entered. Two are one-off amounts spread across a cycle, and they say so. The dashed figures are ours, not yours: they are the assumptions this model holds fixed so the arithmetic stays comparable between firms.
Starting figures describe a firm carrying 400 devices. Replace them with yours — every editable field recalculates as you type, and your entries persist in this browser only.
The annual platform fee below is for firms whose own system costs them more than $150,000 a year to run. Smaller operations are better served by Atlas’s per-project pricing, and this page will say so if that is where your numbers land.
What you pay for that platform is not counted anywhere on this page, so the comparison below understates what Atlas displaces. On rate alone we come in at nearly half: the platform most firms are on starts at $2.50 per billed project hour, Atlas Public starts at $1.50 per field-staff hour and tiers down to $0.75 — and only field hours are metered, not your PMs, office or executives. Tell us what you pay when you request a quote and we will price against it.
Then you carry no platform cost, and the comparison below is about the fleet, the yard and the paper. Those are real, and they are the whole case at your size.
Ten per cent of the fleet is damaged, lost or stolen in a year. What that costs you depends on the line above it: enter an insurance premium and each one costs you a $50 deductible; leave insurance at zero and the model takes you at your word that you self-insure, so each one costs a full replacement device. Either way it is spread monthly. At a $650 device and a $5 premium those two paths happen to cost almost exactly the same — insurance priced at the risk. Cheaper devices make self-insuring the better deal; more expensive ones make the premium worth paying.
This is the fleet you own, not the headcount on any one project. A firm keeps devices on the shelf so it can field whatever comes — a ten-person job, a hundred-monitor activation, or ten projects at once that swallow nearly all of them — and generally that shelf holds 300 to 1,000 devices. The people are not the cost; the devices are. What drives the figure hardest is the mix: a tablet on a data plan is a few dollars a month, a phone with a number on it is two or three times that, and both are paid every month of the year whether the device is in a truck or in a box.
The six-year replacement cycle is the one thing held fixed here, and it is generous in your favour — most fleets turn over faster than that, which would raise the figure rather than lower it.
Hard spend only. The hours your staff put into handling, scanning, filing and keying paper are real and are not counted here — this model leaves them on your side of the ledger rather than claim them.
An estimate of the time and cost of an entry-level logistics clerk to manage your assets and logistics — a quarter of one person at a fully loaded $5,000 a month. At most firms it is not a dedicated role; it is the part of somebody’s week that the fleet, the storage units and the trailers take. The line only applies if you carry assets: enter no devices, no storage locations and no trailers and it reads zero.
Not counted — you answered that you do not run a system of your own.
An average between a quiet month of around $500 and an active month of around $2,000 — and it climbs with how many projects you keep stored, because a closed project still has to be queryable years later.
The cost of reaching out to your IT team during an activation — database support, troubleshooting and workarounds while the deadline is live. Most in-house systems occupy $10,000–$15,000 in IT payroll on a large activation for this alone.
Two OS releases a year, store policy changes, certificate rotations and library CVEs will easily consume 20% of a developer’s time. On a $180,000 salary that is an average of $3,000 a month in utilization charged to your ADMS — and to no client.
A major rebuild will easily cost more than $400,000, and the pressure to do one arrives every four or five years just to stay relevant. $250,000 every seven years stretches the budget in your favour; it is the generous reading of the obligation, not the likely one.
Monitors install the app on the phone they already carry — their own line, their own data. Keep only what supervisors and spares genuinely need; plan, replacement, MDM, insurance and repair all scale with the fleet you keep.
Atlas is not only software — it is designed to reduce your assets and your physical footprint. No device fleet to stage, no printed logs, daily reports, damage reports or ready-to-go form stock to warehouse. A firm could reasonably dropship most PPE and equipment straight to the site and eliminate its physical footprint entirely. The figure here assumes something more conservative: that you can reasonably reduce to one smaller location, at about three-quarters the cost of one you keep today.
Tickets, certifications, daily reports and closeout packets are digital end to end. What is left is placards and/or paper timesheets and sign-in sheets, if you choose to use them.
No issue, recovery, wipe or shipping cycle. What remains is keeping track of the spares and supervisor devices you chose to hold.
Roughly twenty updates a week reach the platform. Every one of them arrives on your tenant without a release of your own, a store submission, or a developer’s weekend.
What Atlas costs you cannot be computed without our pricing, and we would rather price it against the numbers you just entered than send you a generic figure. Tell us where to send it and the rest of this page opens:
Atlas platform quote
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Annual carry today
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Annual spend Atlas displaces
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Your break-even ceiling: at any annual fee below this, Atlas costs you less than the status quo.
Net annual change
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| Cost center | Today | Under Atlas | Freed |
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| Total | — | — | — |
This is a planning tool, not a quote. It performs arithmetic on the figures you enter and on the fixed assumptions shown above; the quote it displays is indicative and is confirmed per organization against modules licensed, active projects and seats. Capability claims elsewhere on this site are drawn from the shipped platform.
Pick a completed activation. We stand up a branded organization on your own subdomain, load the project shape, and walk the ticket, the certification, the exception flags, the reconciliation and the closeout packet — about ninety minutes.