Small Business Video Surveillance: A Plain Guide

You want cameras for your shop, office or restaurant. Where do you start? Small business video surveillance comes down to five decisions: how many cameras, a recorder or the cloud, how many days of video to keep, how to keep it all off the open internet, and who watches. The first four are about equipment. The fifth is about people, and it is the easiest one to skip.

For one site, that usually means four to eight cameras: every door people use, the register, the back room and the lot. A recorder at the site that keeps about a month of video. No port opened on the router. And a plan for who looks when something happens. One installer in eastern Massachusetts puts a system of that size, installed, at $3,500 to $7,500. Below we take each decision in turn, with prices from each company's own page as of October 2026. We make one of the options for the last decision, so we say who it fits, next to the others.

How many cameras does a small business need?

Count the doors, not the square feet. Every door that people use gets a camera on the inside, at about head height, so a person walking in is clear. Then the register, from above and a little behind the cashier, so the hands and the drawer show. Then the places where stock or cash sits with nobody around: the stockroom, the cash office, and the back door where deliveries come in and the trash goes out. Last, the parking lot, if your customers park there.

That is usually 4 to 8 cameras. Power Up Boston, the installer above, puts retail shops, small offices and restaurants in that band. One of its recent jobs, a restaurant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, had six.

Why not one wide camera that sees the whole room? Because a wide view shows that something happened, but not who did it or what they took. So ask one question of each spot. If something went wrong here, what would you need to show? A person at the door, a hand in the drawer, a car in the lot at 2 a.m. Then aim the camera at that.

Recorder or cloud for small business video surveillance?

There are two ways to keep the video. A recorder, called an NVR (network video recorder), sits in the back office and writes every camera to its own hard drive. Or the cameras send their video to a company's cloud service, and you pay a licence for each camera.

The recorder is a one-time cost. In that Plymouth job the six cameras were $1,800 and the recorder with 6 TB of storage was $1,400. Labor and cabling were $2,800, so the whole system came to $6,000. Cloud storage on top of a recorder, by the same installer's numbers, runs $15 to $50 a camera a month.

Cloud camera companies sell their own cameras with that licence. As of October 2026, Verkada prices its smallest indoor dome at $799, hardware only, with a licence required on top. Rhombus prices a small dome at $399, plus $149 for a one-year licence, and its service needs no recorder at all. So for eight cameras, the Verkada domes alone come to $6,392 before any licence.

What does the cloud buy you? You manage everything from a browser, across many sites, with no box in the back room. With some plans you also get a copy of the video away from the store. That copy matters in one case: a thief who takes the recorder. Rhombus keeps cloud archiving off its Professional licence, so check which plan carries it before you count on it.

So which fits? For one site with a few cameras, a recorder is probably the better buy. Put it in a locked room or a closed cabinet, away from the register, so the person who takes the cash cannot take the video too. For many sites and nobody who wants to look after hardware, a cloud system starts to make sense. And if you already own a recorder that works, keep it. We explained why in the cameras are already paid for.

How many days of video should you keep?

About a month. Verkada sells its indoor domes with 30 to 90 days of retention, and Rhombus's smallest dome keeps 20 days on its default settings.

Why a month? Because the people who need your video ask late. An insurer, the police or an unemployment hearing can ask weeks after the day. We went through who asks, and when, in who actually asks for your footage. A recorder that keeps one week has written over the clip by then.

How much storage is that? The installer's rule of thumb is 8 TB for about a month of 4K video from 8 cameras, and 4 TB for about two weeks. So ask how many days your drive holds before you sign off on the install. Then check it yourself a month later. The oldest video on the recorder tells you the real number.

Now the habit that matters more than the drive. When something happens, export the clip the same day. Once it sits on a USB stick or your computer, it no longer depends on the recorder's clock.

How do you keep the cameras off the open internet?

In 2025, researchers at Bitsight found more than 40,000 cameras streaming live on the open internet, about 14,000 of them in the US. How do cameras end up like that? Probably through remote viewing. To watch on a phone, many setups open a port on the store's router, and that port answers anyone who finds it. We explained the mechanics, and a safer shape, in no open ports.

Four steps cover most of it. The first three come from CISA, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

1. Change the default password on the recorder and on every camera. CISA asks for passwords that are "random, unique, and at least 16 characters long".
2. Turn on automatic updates where the recorder has them, and check for firmware updates where it does not.
3. Replace a recorder that its maker no longer updates. CISA calls such hardware "end of life" and puts replacing it next to patching.
4. Open no ports on the router for the cameras. Watch them through a service that connects out from the store, so nothing on the internet can start a connection in.

Who actually watches the cameras?

Probably nobody, most of the time. The recorder records, and someone scrubs through it after the fact. That works for proof. It does nothing at 2 a.m. There are three ways to have someone look while it happens.

A guard on site is the oldest. The median security guard earned $38,020 a year in May 2025, about $18 an hour. One night shift, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., every night of the year, is 2,920 hours. That is about $53,000 a year in wages alone, before payroll taxes and an agency's margin.

A monitoring company is the second. Its operators look at your cameras when the system flags something, talk through a speaker and call the police. We priced them in remote video monitoring costs, and most sell by quote.

Alerts to your own phone are the third. Your recorder can already send motion alerts. Then the wind, the headlights and the cats set them off all night, and the alerts get turned off within a week. That is why the newer AI alerts check what moved before they send anything.

Shobdo is one of these. It works with the recorder you already have: Dahua, Hikvision, Frigate NVR, or anything that supports ONVIF or RTSP. One AI writes down what happens on every camera. When something matters, a second AI watches the clip before anyone gets a text. You write what to watch for in your own words, like "tell me if anyone goes behind the counter after 9". The text comes with a short GIF and a link, or by Telegram. Footage stays on your recorder, and video is not stored in the cloud.

Shobdo does not talk to anyone at the store or call the police today, and it captures no audio. You see what happened and decide. Each alert already arrives as a checked clip with a written description, so handing it to a monitoring center you pick, or setting off the store's own siren after the second check, fits the same design. Shobdo also does not keep a copy of your footage away from the store. What it keeps is the written log of events in your account, which you can search by words and by time.

What does a small business security camera system cost?

Add it up for one store with 8 cameras, and the equipment turns out to be the smaller question. The bigger one is the watching. A night guard is a payroll, a monitoring company is a monthly quote, and alerts on your own recorder have a published monthly price.

Here is each option side by side, from the companies' own pages in October 2026.

Common questions

Can I install a small business security camera system myself? Yes, if you can run the cables. Power Up Boston puts the labor for easy jobs, like drop ceilings, at $500 to $1,500, and for hard ones, with concrete walls or long runs, at $2,000 to $5,000 or more.

Where can't I put cameras? Restrooms, locker rooms and staff lounges. Connecticut, for one, bars employers from recording staff in rest rooms, locker rooms or lounges. It also requires written notice to employees before other electronic monitoring, apart from security cameras in areas open to the public. Rules differ by state, so check yours before the install.

Should my cameras record sound? Probably not. Many cameras have a microphone, and sound brings in wiretap law. In New Hampshire, using a device to pick up a conversation without the consent of all parties is a felony. Shobdo captures no audio.

Shobdo is an AI agent for the security cameras your store already owns. It writes down what it sees and texts you only when something matters. Learn more or book a conversation.