Security System Costs, Contracts, and Cancellation: The Fine Print

By the Home Security Systems & Alarms editorial team · Research-based (no hands-on testing) - see how we evaluate · Last updated August 29, 2026

Home security pricing is engineered to make the first number you see small and the last number you pay large. "Free installation" recovers its cost in the monthly rate. "$0 down" means a five-year equipment loan. "No contract" sometimes means the monitoring has no contract while the equipment financing very much does. This page collects the fine print - cost ranges verified as of July 2026, contract mechanics, termination math, and the questions that surface all of it before you sign.

All prices below are around the listed amounts as of July 2026 - verify current pricing directly with providers, because promotions in this industry change weekly.

Upfront costs: what equipment really runs

Two pricing behaviors to know. First, list prices in this category are soft: Cove, for example, was advertising 70% off most equipment in mid-2026, and Black Friday/Prime Day discounts on DIY kits are dependable. Never pay list without checking. Second, "free equipment" from contract providers isn't free - it's amortized into 36–60 months of elevated monthly payments. Always compare total cost over the full term.

Monthly costs

• Self-monitoring: $0 on most DIY brands (Ring, Abode, eufy, Wyze); camera cloud storage typically $3–$10/month if you want it. SimpliSafe's Self Monitoring plan with camera recordings is published at 33¢ a day (read 2026-08-26), which converts to about $10.04 a month.
• No-contract professional monitoring: roughly $10–$43/month. Wyze and eufy around $9.99; Ring around $19.99–$20; Cove about $23.42 (Basic) to $43.50 (Premium) and SimpliSafe about $23.12 (Standard) to $33.46 (Core), both converted by us from the daily rates they publish; Abode around $26.99. One thing worth knowing before you compare any of these: re-checked on August 28, 2026, neither Cove nor SimpliSafe publishes a monthly price on its own plan page at all. Both quote a daily rate. Cove lists $0.77, $1.10 and $1.43 a day; SimpliSafe lists 76¢ a day for Standard, $1.10 for Core, $1.66 to $2.66 for Pro and Pro Plus, and 33¢ for Self Monitoring with camera recordings. Correction, August 26, 2026: this bullet used to say the monthly figures above were the daily rates "multiplied by 30", and that 76¢ a day and $22.99 a month "are the same number". Neither statement survives checking. Multiplying by 30 ignores the five or six days a year you are also billed for, and 76¢ a day is $277.40 a year, which is $23.12 a month, not $22.99. The SimpliSafe monthly figures on this page are now the daily rates multiplied by 365 and divided by 12, and they are labelled as our arithmetic because SimpliSafe does not publish a monthly price for us to quote. Second correction, August 28, 2026: the August 26 pass fixed SimpliSafe and left Cove alone, so this bullet went on quoting $22.99 to $42.99 as Cove's prices in the same sentence that said Cove publishes no monthly price. Cove's $0.77, $1.10 and $1.43 a day convert to $23.42, $33.46 and $43.50, and those figures are now ours and labelled as such. We do not know when either company adopted the daily format, so treat this as a description of what those pages say today rather than as a recent change. The point still stands: a daily rate is harder to add up over a year, and it is the one you see first.
• Takeover monitoring of an existing wired system: from roughly $8–$10/month (GeoArm, Alarm Grid).
• Traditional contract providers: ADT Self Setup professional monitoring from $24.99 to $37.99/month depending on the kit, month-to-month and requiring AutoPay enrolment (ADT's own shop terms, verified 2026-08-09); ADT professionally installed plans from $59.99/month, which is a floor rather than a range: as of 2026-08-09 that figure appears only in the fine print of ADT's current promotion ("36 mo. pro monitoring plan starting at $59.99/mo"), and ADT publishes no monthly price at all on its main security page, its package comparison page or its DIY comparison page, while adt.com/pricing returns a "not found" page. The $45.99 figure this page carried until today no longer appears anywhere on ADT's site; Brinks Home publishes "Protection starts at just $29.99/month" alongside free professional installation on its own how-to-buy page (read 2026-08-20), and states no contract term there; this page previously said "roughly $39.99–$49.99/month" with no source, which overstated Brinks' published floor by $10 (see the correction note below); Vivint's how-to-buy page was rebuilt at some point before August 22, 2026, and it now carries three different monthly monitoring figures at once: "Vivint Monitoring starts at $24.99/mo" in the hero, "Vivint 24/7 Professional Monitoring Starting at $44.99/mo" further down the same page, and "$29.99/mo." inside the HomeProtect offer terms at the foot of it (all three read 2026-08-22). None of them is hidden and none of them is wrong; they describe different bundles. The practical consequence for a shopper is that the number you quote back to a salesperson depends entirely on how far down that page you scrolled, and every one of them is before cameras, before add-on devices and before the equipment loan payment. Correction, August 17, 2026: this page previously said Vivint no longer publishes a package price list at all. That was wrong, and it was wrong because we had only been reading Vivint's buying page. Vivint's own pricing article does publish a package list, including upfront equipment prices, 0% APR monthly equivalents and approximate monitoring for each package, and it publishes both installation prices for its HomeProtect package. The accurate version is narrower: Vivint's buying page routes you to a phone call, while the figures live in an article you have to already be looking for. See our audit of published installation and setup fees for what those two paths cost side by side.

The 5-year math makes the stakes clear: $9.99/month is about $600 over five years; $49.99/month is about $3,000 - before equipment. Which level of service you actually need is the subject of our monitoring decision guide.

Contract lengths and what they really mean

Sourcing for this table, added August 19, 2026: the ADT term and the 75% figure come from ADT's Residential security terms and conditions and ADT's Monitoring Contract Terms, both read 2026-08-19. Updated August 22, 2026: the Vivint row no longer rests on third-party reporting. Its financing term is now quoted from Vivint's own how-to-buy page, read 2026-08-22. The Brinks term figure is still third-party and is labelled as such in the table rather than presented as a published term. The DIY row describes plans each brand publishes on its own site.

Read the term as a debt: a 36-month contract at $50/month is a $1,800 commitment, and the ETF clause determines how much of it you owe if life changes. Moving is the exception people are most often told wrongly about. ADT's own support site says that a move requires cancelling "in most cases", because monitoring contracts are "typically tied to the location of the home being monitored", and its residential terms state that a professionally installed system remains ADT's property. Whether your provider will transfer the term, restart it, or end it is a question to settle in writing before you list the house; our guide to moving with a security system sets out what each of six providers publishes.

Which companies will tell you the terms before you call

We re-read providers' own pages on a rolling schedule. On August 16, 2026 we read five of them for contract language rather than for price, and the interesting difference was not the length of the term. It was whether a shopper can find the term at all without first handing a salesperson a phone number.

Correction, August 20, 2026. The monitoring list above described Brinks Home as "roughly $39.99 to $49.99 a month". That figure carried no source, and it was found by a sweep of this site's own unsourced price claims rather than by a reader. Brinks Home's own how-to-buy page, read on August 20, 2026, states "Protection starts at just $29.99/month". Our figure was $10 above what the company publishes, which is the kind of error that makes a provider look more expensive than it says it is, so the correction is stated here rather than made quietly. A caveat that applies to every starting rate on this page, including this one: a published floor is the price of the smallest system a company sells, and Vivint is the only large provider we have found that also publishes what monitoring costs on its standard packages, where it runs approximately $47 to $57 a month against a $24.99 floor.

Correction, August 19, 2026. When this table was first published on August 16 it recorded ADT's early-exit fee as named but not quantified. That understated what ADT publishes. Re-reading the same fine print on August 19 and following its own "terms here" link reaches a page that states the figure outright, and ADT's full Monitoring Contract Terms state it in capitals. ADT publishes its early-termination percentage; it simply takes one more click than Frontpoint's does. The row has been corrected. We would rather record that we were unfair to a company than leave it standing.

Read that table for its shape rather than for a winner. The provider stating the harshest exit terms here, Frontpoint at 80%, is also the one stating them plainly on a page anyone can open without talking to a human being, and ADT's 75% is one link away from its own promotional fine print. The provider publishing the least, Vivint, is not offering a shorter commitment in exchange; it is offering the same kind of commitment with the paperwork arriving later, once someone is already in your living room. "We will build you a custom quote" is a pricing strategy, not a courtesy.

Correction, August 22, 2026. The Vivint row above used to say "No", flatly. Re-reading Vivint's own how-to-buy page on August 22 shows that is no longer accurate: the page now publishes a financing ladder in plain sight, including the sentence "We offer flexible financing options based on your order size, with terms up to 36 months at 0% interest", together with the tiers it applies to. The row has been softened to "Partly" and the specific thing Vivint still does not publish, a monitoring contract length, is named instead. This is the second correction on this page in a week that runs against our own editorial interest, and it is recorded here for the same reason as the first: a comparison site benefits from providers looking opaque, so the burden of proof runs the other way.

A practical use for this: before any sales conversation, open the provider's own terms page and save the term length and the exit clause. If you cannot find either one, that is your first question, and the answer belongs in writing rather than in a conversation.

Is a five-year contract normal?

No for monitoring, and genuinely unclear for equipment financing, because Vivint publishes two different maximums on the same page. The longest monitoring term any provider above publishes is 36 months. For equipment financing, Vivint's how-to-buy page, read again on August 29, 2026, states in its pricing section that it offers "terms up to 36 months at 0% interest" above a ladder that stops at 36 months, and states in the "Financing Options" paragraph of the offer terms further down the same page that "Qualified customers may finance at 0% APR for up to 60 months, with terms varying by offer." Both sentences are Vivint's, on one URL, on the same day. We quote both rather than picking the friendlier one or the more alarming one.

Correction, August 29, 2026. Until today this paragraph said the longest equipment financing term Vivint publishes is "also 36 months". That was drawn from the pricing ladder on August 22 and it was not a complete reading of the page: the 60-month sentence sits in the offer terms block below it, which the August 22 read did not quote. Whether that sentence was present on August 22 cannot be established from here, so no claim is made either way. The practical point for a buyer is unchanged in direction and larger in size than we said: ask which term your own paperwork carries, because Vivint's own terms contemplate a loan running five years even though its published ladder tops out at three.

The confusion is usually two separate documents being described as one. The monitoring agreement and the equipment loan are different contracts with different balances, and the loan does not end when the monitoring service does. So a quote can genuinely involve two commitments at once without either of them being five years long. What changed on this page, twice: until August 22 it repeated the widely reported figure of 42 to 60 months for financed Vivint hardware, sourced to third parties because Vivint published nothing. On August 22 we replaced that with Vivint's own ladder of 12, 18, 24 and 36-month terms by order size and called 36 the maximum. On August 29 a fuller read of the same page found Vivint's offer terms publishing 0% APR "for up to 60 months". So the third-party figure this page removed as unsupported has turned out to have a Vivint sentence behind it after all, and the honest position is that Vivint publishes both. If your paperwork says 48 or 60 months, it is not out of line with what Vivint's own terms allow, and the number to check is the one on your agreement rather than the one in any ladder.

So when a quote mentions five years, the useful question is not whether that is normal. It is which of the two agreements the number belongs to, and what happens to the other one if you cancel. Our guide to what no money down home security actually costs works through a real offer where those two numbers come apart.

The clauses that bite

Auto-renewal

Many traditional contracts renew automatically at the end of the initial term - sometimes month-to-month, sometimes for a further fixed period depending on the agreement and state law (a number of states restrict long auto-renewals). The practical trap: cancellation usually requires notice within a specific window, in writing, and sometimes only after speaking to a retention department. Calendar your contract end date the day you sign, and ask exactly what the renewal term and notice window are.

Mid-contract price increases

ADT's published residential terms, for example, allow it to increase the service charge after the first year of the term. The offsetting consumer right in those terms: if you object in writing within 30 days of the increase notice and ADT doesn't waive the increase, you can terminate without the termination charge. Most customers never learn this. Whoever your provider is, find the rate-increase clause before signing and ask whether an increase gives you a penalty-free exit - then keep every increase notice you receive.

Early termination fees

Worked example using ADT's published structure (up to 75% of remaining monthly charges): cancel a $50/month, 36-month contract at month 12 and you can owe up to 75% × $50 × 24 remaining months = $900 - to stop receiving a service. This is why the "free" $850 equipment package isn't free. The main penalty-free exits are: the initial trial window (ADT has offered a 6-month money-back guarantee subject to conditions; others offer around 30 days), a qualifying objection to a rate increase (above), and - under the FTC's Cooling-Off Rule - three business days after signing a door-to-door sale. For the full step-by-step, the exact fee math, and every exit that can actually apply to you, see our dedicated guide on how to cancel ADT and when you can avoid the termination fee.

Equipment financing traps

Vivint's Flex Pay model is the clearest example of the modern structure: equipment is bought on a 0%-APR installment loan, and monitoring is billed separately. Vivint's own how-to-buy page, read August 22, 2026, publishes the loan terms as a ladder tied to order size, "Pay in 4" on any order, then 12 months at 0% from $299, 18 months from $599, 24 months from $999 and 36 months from $1,499, under the heading "terms up to 36 months at 0% interest". The offer terms lower down the same page, read August 29, 2026, put the ceiling higher: "Qualified customers may finance at 0% APR for up to 60 months, with terms varying by offer." A ladder and a ceiling are not the same claim, and on a loan that is billed separately from the service you can cancel, the ceiling is the number that decides how long you are paying. Monitoring on the same page is quoted as starting at $24.99, at $44.99 and at $29.99 in three different places, and rises with cameras and add-on devices. The marketing truthfully says monitoring has no long-term contract - but if you cancel, the equipment loan doesn't cancel with it. You owe the balance on hardware that mostly works only with the provider's service. Before accepting any financed equipment, ask: "If I cancel monitoring after 12 months, exactly what do I owe, and what does the equipment still do?" Already in a Vivint agreement and want out? Our dedicated guide to how to cancel Vivint covers the buyout math, the transfer option, and the documented penalty-free exits.

The same structure is sold under a friendlier name: no money down. Three quite different arrangements share that phrase, and they behave differently the moment you try to leave one. Our guide to what no money down home security actually costs separates the three, works the arithmetic on a real dealer offer and a real early termination fee, and lists the five questions to ask before signing.

Equipment you don't own - or can't reuse

With DIY brands you own everything outright. With traditional providers, read the ownership clause: some equipment is leased, and even owned proprietary panels (like ADT Command) generally can't be taken over by another monitoring company, which quietly eliminates your leverage to switch. Details in our guide to reusing old ADT equipment.

Cancellation difficulty, compared

General cancellation hygiene regardless of provider: get the cancellation confirmation number and a written/email confirmation, watch the next two billing cycles, and if you're moving, don't rely on the buyer of your home "taking over" the contract unless the provider confirms the transfer in writing.

Questions to ask before signing anything

1. What is the total of all payments - equipment, monitoring, fees - over the full term?
2. Is the equipment purchased, financed, or leased? Who owns it on day one, and at the end?
3. If I cancel after 12 months, what exactly do I owe? (Make them show the ETF formula.)
4. Can you raise my rate during the term? If you do, can I exit without penalty?
5. What happens at the end of the term - auto-renewal length, notice window, and how notice must be delivered?
6. If I move, what are my options and costs?
7. If I later switch providers, can another company monitor this equipment, or is the panel proprietary?
8. What's the trial/money-back window, and does it cover installation fees?
9. Does my city require an alarm permit, and who pays false-alarm fines? (Check yourself here - fines and permit fees are a real recurring cost the sales process never mentions.)
10. Which of these answers are in the written contract, and where? (If an answer exists only verbally, it doesn't exist.)

Sources

• ADT - Residential Terms and Conditions (accessed 2026-07-02)
• ADT - Monitoring Terms & Conditions (rate increase and objection clause) (accessed 2026-07-02)
• SafeWise - How to Cancel Your ADT Contract (accessed 2026-07-02)
• SafeHome.org - ADT Contract Length, Cancellation Policy, Terms & Renewals (accessed 2026-07-02)
• HomeGuide - How Much Does ADT Cost? (accessed 2026-07-02)
• Security.org - Vivint Pricing & Plan Cost (accessed 2026-07-02)
• Vivint - Financing FAQ (accessed 2026-07-02)
• SafeHome.org - Vivint Contract Length & Cancellation Policy (accessed 2026-07-02)
• SafeWise - Home Security System Cancellation Policies (accessed 2026-07-02)
• Brinks Home - Terms of Service (accessed 2026-07-02)
• Brinks Home - How to buy a new security system ("Protection starts at just $29.99/month"; free professional installation; no contract term stated on the page) (accessed 2026-08-20)
• Security.org - SimpliSafe Package Costs & Monitoring Plans (accessed 2026-07-02)
• Security.org - Cove Cost and Pricing (accessed 2026-07-02)
• Ring - 8-Piece Alarm Security Kit (accessed 2026-07-02)
• SafeHome.org - Wyze Packages & Plans (accessed 2026-07-02)
• FTC Consumer Advice - Home Security System Shopping (Cooling-Off Rule) (accessed 2026-07-02)
• GeoArm - Alarm Monitoring from $8/month (accessed 2026-07-02)
• ADT - Deals & Special Promotions, offer fine print: "Req. min. $349 pro installed system purchase and 36 mo. pro monitoring plan starting at $59.99/mo. Early term fees." (accessed 2026-08-09). Re-read 2026-08-28: that sentence is no longer present anywhere in the page, and the offer now reads "$99 home security system includes Google Nest Cam and installation" with "36 mo. contract. Pro Monitoring Plan starting at $59.99/mo. Subject to credit approval."
• ADT - Shop (ADT Blu self-setup), promotion terms: "Requires month-to-month Pro-Protect monitoring plan for ADT Blu systems from $24.99 - $37.99/mo. depending on Kit selected (one month minimum) and enrollment in ADT AutoPay." (accessed 2026-08-09)
• ADT - Residential security terms and conditions: "Requires 36-month monitoring contract starting at $59.99/mo. (24-month monitoring contract in California, total fees from $1,439.76)"; "Upon early termination of 36-month monitoring contract, ADT may charge 75% of the monthly service charges due for the balance of the initial contract term"; "Professionally installed system remains property of ADT" (accessed 2026-08-19)
• ADT - Monitoring Contract Terms, Paragraph 2: "IF I CANCEL SERVICE OR OTHERWISE TERMINATE THIS CONTRACT DURING ITS INITIAL TERM ... I WILL PAY ADT 75% OF THE TOTAL REMAINING MONTHLY CHARGES ... NO CONTRACT TERMINATION CHARGES ARE DUE IF I TERMINATE, OR IF ADT CANCELS, DURING THE THIRTY (30)-DAY RENEWAL PERIOD(S)" (accessed 2026-08-19)
• Frontpoint - Offer Details, monitoring terms: Ultimate "regularly priced at $49.99 per month, plus tax, and are governed by a 36-month contract", Interactive at $44.99 and Video-Only from $14.99 on the same 36-month term, and "Early termination of the 36-month contract may result in Frontpoint charging an early termination fee of 80% of the monthly charges for the remainder of the contract term." (accessed 2026-08-16)
• ADT - Deals & Special Promotions, offer fine print re-read for contract language: "Min purchase req'd. 36 mo. contract. Early terms fees apply." and, for the self-setup line, "no long-term contracts" (accessed 2026-08-16)
• Cove - Professionally Monitored Home Security plans, "No Contracts, Cancel Anytime" listed on all three tiers, with published rates of $0.77, $1.10 and $1.43 a day and a 60-day risk-free trial (accessed 2026-08-16)
• SimpliSafe - Monitoring Plans, published as per-day rates (76¢ Standard, $1.10 Core, $1.66 to $2.66 Pro and Pro Plus, 33¢ self monitoring with camera recordings) with no contract term and no monthly figure stated on the page (re-checked, unchanged, 2026-08-26)
• SimpliSafe - home-security-monitoring, the URL that previously carried SimpliSafe's monthly plan prices; returned SimpliSafe's own "Page not found" when checked, while SimpliSafe's own top navigation still links to it (accessed 2026-08-26)
• Vivint - How to Buy, the only Vivint surface still publishing a figure: "Equipment starts at $199.99" and "Vivint Monitoring starts at $24.99/mo" (accessed 2026-08-15)
• Vivint - How to Buy, re-read after the page was rebuilt: "We offer flexible financing options based on your order size, with terms up to 36 months at 0% interest", with tiers of Pay in 4 on any order, 12 months at 0% from $299, 18 months from $599, 24 months from $999 and 36 months from $1,499; three separate monitoring figures on the one page ("Vivint Monitoring starts at $24.99/mo", "Vivint 24/7 Professional Monitoring Starting at $44.99/mo", and "Vivint system monitoring at $29.99/mo." in the HomeProtect Offer Terms); HomeProtect equipment "regularly priced at $349.99, with professional installation priced at $199"; HomeProtect Pro requires "a minimum $749.99 expenditure on equipment (after discounts)" (accessed 2026-08-22)
• Vivint - How to Buy, whole-page re-read including the offer terms block: every figure above verbatim unchanged, and the "Financing Options" paragraph states "Qualified customers may finance at 0% APR for up to 60 months, with terms varying by offer", which the same page's pricing section contradicts with "terms up to 36 months at 0% interest". Professional installation is shown struck through at $199 and marked FREE in the promotional layer, while the HomeProtect Offer Terms on the same page still price it at $199 "unless otherwise advertised" (accessed 2026-08-29)

Update log: August 29, 2026 - a correction this page made a week ago was itself incomplete, and the figure it removed as unsupported turns out to have a Vivint sentence behind it. On August 22 this page replaced the widely repeated "42 to 60 months" for financed Vivint equipment with Vivint's own published ladder, and called 36 months the maximum Vivint publishes. A whole-page re-read on August 29 found the "Financing Options" paragraph in the offer terms of that same URL stating "Qualified customers may finance at 0% APR for up to 60 months, with terms varying by offer". The August 22 read had quoted the pricing section and not the terms block below it. Both Vivint sentences are now shown together, in three places on this page, with neither presented as the company's single answer. No other figure changed: monitoring, HomeProtect and HomeProtect Pro prices were all re-read on August 29 and are verbatim unchanged. An outbound-link tracking script was also added to this page; it changes nothing a reader sees.

Update log: August 26, 2026 - two things this page said about SimpliSafe's pricing were checked again and one of them was our own arithmetic error. SimpliSafe still publishes only daily rates (76¢, $1.10, $1.66 to $2.66 and 33¢ a day, re-read 2026-08-26), and the URL that used to carry its monthly prices returns SimpliSafe's own "Page not found", so this page no longer presents $22.99 or $32.99 as figures SimpliSafe states. More importantly, this page had been converting daily to monthly by multiplying by 30, and asserting that 76¢ a day and $22.99 a month "are the same number". They are not: 76¢ a day is $277.40 a year, or $23.12 a month. Multiplying by 30 quietly drops five or six billed days a year. The conversion is now 365 ÷ 12 across the site and it is labelled as ours. The SimpliSafe camera self-monitoring line was rebuilt on the same basis. No Cove, ADT, Vivint or Brinks figure was touched.

Update log: August 22, 2026 - Vivint started publishing its financing terms again, and the number is smaller than the one everybody repeats. A routine re-read of Vivint's own how-to-buy page found it rebuilt. It now states "terms up to 36 months at 0% interest" and lists the tiers by order size. Until today this page reported financed Vivint hardware at 42 to 60 months, on third-party authority, and said in two places that Vivint publishes no term at all. Both statements were true when written and are not true now, so the 42-to-60 figure has been removed rather than carried alongside the company's own number, and the transparency table's Vivint row has been softened from "No" to "Partly" with the thing Vivint still does not publish named specifically. Also recorded: the same page now carries three different monthly monitoring figures at once, $24.99, $44.99 and $29.99, describing different bundles. Two other changes, unrelated to Vivint. The summary box at the top said a professionally installed contract "commonly" costs $40 to $60+ a month; that band carried no source and three of the four providers we track publish a starting rate below its floor, so it has been replaced with the published range of $24.99 to $59.99 and the 36-month term. And this page's title and description were rewritten to lead with contract terms, because Search Console shows it ranking between positions 2 and 11 for questions about contract terms and between 29 and 76 for the cost phrases the old title targeted. Earlier: August 19, 2026 - a sourcing audit of this page's comparison tables, and one correction that goes in a company's favour. Three changes. First, the contract-length table's ADT row is now tied to ADT's own documents: the 36-month term, the 24-month California term and the 75% termination charge are quoted from ADT's residential terms and its published Monitoring Contract Terms, read August 19, and a sourcing note sits beneath the table. Second, the Vivint 42-to-60-month loan term is now labelled as a third-party figure, because Vivint publishes no term on its own site. Third, the transparency table said ADT's early-exit fee was named but not quantified; following the "terms here" link in ADT's own fine print reaches the quantified figure, so that row was corrected and the correction is stated on the page rather than made silently. One sentence of body text was also replaced: it said moving "usually does not void the contract", which is the opposite of what ADT publishes. No price, provider ranking or recommendation on this page was changed. Earlier: August 17, 2026 - corrected a claim this page had been making about Vivint. It said Vivint no longer publishes a package price list at all. Vivint's own pricing article does publish one, and also publishes two different installation prices for the same package, so the sentence was replaced with the narrower and accurate version rather than quietly deleted. No price figure on this page changed. Earlier: August 16, 2026 - added a section comparing which providers publish their contract term and early-exit fee on their own websites, built by re-reading ADT, Frontpoint, Cove and SimpliSafe for contract language on August 16, 2026 and Vivint on August 15, 2026, plus a direct answer to whether a five-year contract is normal. No price, provider ranking or recommendation on this page was changed. Earlier: August 9, 2026 - the ADT monitoring figures were re-checked against ADT's own site and both were changed. The professionally installed band of "$45.99 to $59.99" became from $59.99, because $45.99 no longer appears anywhere on adt.com and the only rate ADT still publishes is the "starting at $59.99/mo" line in its current promotion's fine print, which is a floor and not a ceiling. The Self Setup figure of "from around $24.99" became the full published range of $24.99 to $37.99 depending on kit, with AutoPay enrolment required, taken from ADT's own shop terms. Presenting $45.99 as the low end had been understating ADT's own published starting price by $14 a month, or about $504 across a 36-month term. No other price, provider or recommendation on this page was changed. Earlier: July 27, 2026 - corrected the ADT professionally installed band from $49.99 to $45.99 to $59.99 after checking ADT's own pages rather than a third-party summary.

Update log: August 28, 2026 - an email alerts sign-up section was added to this page. Nothing else changed: no price, no conversion, no source and no heading. The sign-up form has been working on this site since July 10, 2026, but it sat only on three pages that between them draw about two percent of the site's search impressions, so the pages readers actually arrive on had no way to use it. Separately, later the same day, the Cove monthly figures in the no-contract monitoring bullet were corrected from $22.99 to $42.99 to $23.42 to $43.50. Cove publishes daily rates only and states no monthly price, so the earlier numbers were this site's own multiply-by-30 arithmetic, the exact error corrected for SimpliSafe on August 26 in a pass that was scoped to SimpliSafe and left this bullet contradicting itself in a single sentence. Also on August 28, the ADT deals-page fine print cited in this page's source list was re-read: the "min. $349 pro installed system purchase" sentence is no longer on that page, which now advertises a $99 system including a Google Nest Cam and installation on the same 36-month contract at the same $59.99/mo floor. The source entry now carries both readings with their dates.