A note on numbers

This article does not quote hardware prices. Biometric terminal pricing varies enormously by region, vendor and specification, and a made-up figure would make the arithmetic look authoritative while being worthless.

Instead, here is the set of line items to fill in with quotes you actually have. The SlidesClock side uses its real published prices, because those we can state: Free is $0 permanently for up to 5 employees at 1 location, Standard is $12.99 a month or $129 a year for up to 20 employees and 3 locations, and Premium is $29.99 a month or $300 a year for up to 40 employees and 10 locations. Prices are in USD and paid plans are purchased through the App Store.

The terminal side: what to count

A quote covers the first item on this list. The rest arrive later, which is why the total surprises people.

  • The device itself, per site.
  • Installation: mounting by the door, and power reaching it.
  • Enrolment: staff time to capture a fingerprint for every new starter, repeated at whatever rate your team turns over.
  • Maintenance and replacement: readers wear out, and they fail quietly rather than loudly.
  • Any software or support contract the vendor sells alongside the hardware.
  • The queue: minutes per person per shift change, multiplied by headcount and by working days. This is real paid time even though nobody invoices for it.

The app side: what to count

The list is shorter, and that is most of the argument.

  • The subscription, which scales with headcount rather than with sites.
  • Setup time: creating a workplace and setting its verification policy.
  • Employee phones. In most workplaces these already exist; in some they do not, and that is the honest exception worth checking first.

Where the two curves cross

At one site with a stable team, a terminal can genuinely win over three years. The hardware is bought once and the queue is short.

The second site is where it turns over, because the terminal cost repeats in full — another device, another install, another maintenance obligation — while the app cost does not. Adding a location to a mobile system means creating a workplace, not raising a purchase order.

By the third and fourth site the gap is usually not close, and it widens every time you open another. If you expect to grow, model the cost at the number of sites you will have in three years rather than the number you have today.

The line item nobody puts in the spreadsheet

A terminal fails silently. It stops recognising a fingertip, or it simply stops, and nobody notices until someone looks for a day of records that is not there. That day is gone; there is nothing to reconstruct it from.

A phone-based system fails differently. A flat battery means somebody could not clock out, which surfaces immediately as a correction request a manager reviews, with the original event preserved beside the decision. The failure is visible and recoverable rather than invisible and permanent.

Put a number on a lost day of attendance for your business and add it to whichever column carries the risk. For most teams it changes the answer.

When the terminal is still right

If a regulation in your industry requires biometric identification, the comparison ends there and a terminal is the correct purchase.

If your staff do not carry phones, or are not permitted to use them in the work area, the same applies. These are real constraints and they are worth establishing before modelling anything.

Outside those cases, the practical test is cheap: run the free plan for a month alongside whatever you use now, at one site, and see what the records look like before spending anything.