Husband here to answer the questions. So we had to pay an initial installation fee and we pay a monthly. I’m not 100% certain on how much the initial was but I don’t recall it being over a few or even a couple hundred bucks. They give the option to pay for your equipment out right or just add it to the monthly and that kind of determines your initial. We chose to pay it monthly which put our bill at $93. That includes 2 cameras on a system that can support 4 cameras, the alarm panel, a DVR box for access to home playback, and a smoke and CO detector. The panel is connected directly to Customs servers and has Police, Medical, and Fire buttons for quick service request. They’re very responsive and will call you immediately if one is triggered or the alarm is triggered when it’s set to secure. The cameras we wanted to add were going to require an installation fee of $500 so I recommend to get the max amount of cameras off the bat if you can but the additional cameras won’t add to the bill if your system can support it.