Locally owned since 2010
The alarm industry has a turnover problem. You are the one paying for it.
Every summer, temporary sales crews arrive in Texas neighborhoods on seasonal licensing. They work a subdivision hard for a few months, sign as many sixty-month agreements as they can, and go home. The following spring, a different crew arrives. Nobody in that cycle has any reason to care what your system looks like in year three.
We have taken over hundreds of the systems they left behind. The hardware is usually fine. What failed was the company.
What a national brand physically cannot do
We want to be precise about this, because “support local” is a sentiment and sentiments do not secure buildings. The argument here is mechanical.
A national provider quotes your house from a call center. The person on the phone has a floor-plan assumption, a package tier and a script. They cannot know that the fence on the north side of your property leaves a four-foot gap at the gate, that the greenbelt behind your back fence is unlit and unwatched, or that your detached garage opens onto an alley that sees no traffic after ten at night. Nobody has looked.
That is not a criticism of the individual on the phone. It is a structural limitation of selling a site-specific product remotely at national scale. The package that ships to a house in Cibolo is the package that ships to a house in Ohio, and the sensor count is a function of the tier you agreed to rather than the number of openings in your building.
Our quote follows a technician walking the property. It takes twenty minutes and it is free, and it routinely changes the design — usually by moving coverage from where a package would have put it to where the actual risk is. In Alamo Heights that means the alley-facing garage door. In Shavano Park it means detection at the driveway approach a hundred and fifty feet from the house. In Helotes it means checking cellular signal strength before specifying a radio at all.
The three clauses that cause most of the damage
Read any standard national monitoring agreement and you will find the same three provisions. Each one is legal, disclosed, and initialed by the customer. Together they explain nearly every complaint this industry generates.
The auto-renewal clause extends your agreement automatically unless you deliver written notice inside a narrow window, usually thirty to sixty days before the term ends. It depends entirely on you not remembering paragraph fourteen five years after you signed it, and it works.
The equipment lease means the panel on your wall is not yours. When the term ends and you want to leave, the hardware goes back in a box and the next company starts from bare walls. The cost of leaving is not the termination fee. It is the second installation.
The assignment clause permits the company to sell your account to another company. This is how a customer who carefully researched a local firm ends up, two years later, being invoiced by a name they have never heard, with a support line that routes to a queue. Nothing improper happened. The agreement allowed it.
We do none of the three. One-year terms renewed annually, equipment owned outright, accounts never sold. Each of those is worse for us in a measurable way — no five-year contract asset to borrow against, a larger first invoice, no exit liquidity — and we consider that the price of being the company we claim to be.
Why our technicians stay
Our field technicians average 7 years with the company. In an industry that rebuilds its installation crews every summer, that number is the whole difference, and it is not an accident of culture. They are W-2 employees, not subcontractors paid per install. They are not compensated on hardware volume, which is why they can afford to tell you a panel is fine when four out of five times it is.
The practical consequence is continuity. The person servicing your system in year four is frequently the person who installed it in year one. They know your house has a door that swells shut in August, they know the motion detector in the west-facing living room needed a different angle, and they know your dog. None of that exists in a database. It exists in a person, and only if the person is still here.
Six differences that are not slogans
Each of these costs us something. That is how you know they are real.
The person who quotes you has stood in your house
National sales happens over a phone from another state, working from a floor-plan assumption and a package tier. Our quote follows a technician walking your property and finding the gate nobody locks and the window the fence hides. You cannot design a perimeter you have never seen.
Our technicians stay
The alarm industry runs on seasonal crews and turnover that would embarrass a restaurant. Our field techs average seven years with us. That means the person servicing your system in year four may well be the person who installed it in year one, and they will remember your dog.
A phone number that reaches a person in San Antonio
Not a queue. Not a chat bot. Not a Tier 1 representative reading a decision tree. A local office where someone can open your account, see what your system did last Tuesday, and dispatch a truck.
Nothing gets sold out from under you
The national dealer model routinely sells customer accounts to other companies. People sign with a firm they researched and two years later get invoiced by a name they have never heard. We do not sell accounts. Your account is with us until you decide otherwise.
Free service calls, permanently
No trip charge, no diagnostic fee, no matter how far out you are — Hondo, Devine, Bandera, all of it. Charging a customer at the moment your product fails is a strange way to build loyalty, and we decline to do it.
We will tell you not to buy things
One takeover job in five, we recommend replacement. The other four, we tell you the panel you have is fine and reactivate it. A company compensated on hardware cannot afford to say that. We can, because we are paid to keep you monitored, not to move boxes.
- 16+
- Years in business
- 9,000+
- Texas customers served
- 7 yrs
- Average tech tenure
- 0
- Accounts ever sold
Locally owned since 2010
Homes and businesses
W-2 employees, not subcontractors
Your account stays with us
Fair questions about going local
- What does "locally owned" actually change for me? +
- Three concrete things: the person who quotes you has physically stood in your building, the person who answers your call is in San Antonio and can open your account, and your account cannot be sold to a company you did not choose. Everything else follows from those.
- Are you a dealer for a national brand? +
- No. We are not an authorized dealer, a franchise or an affiliate. We install and monitor under our own Texas DPS Private Security Bureau license, number B16898, and the accounts stay with us.
- What happens to my account if you are acquired? +
- It is a fair question to ask any small provider, and the honest answer is that no company can promise its own permanence. What we can tell you is that we have never sold an account, our agreements run one year at a time, and you own your equipment — which means that in any scenario, you keep the hardware and the freedom to go elsewhere. That is precisely the protection a leased-equipment, five-year contract removes.
- Do local companies use the same monitoring centers as the big brands? +
- Often, yes, and that is a point in our favor rather than against it. The central station is a specialized, heavily regulated, UL-listed facility. Ours is redundant across two geographically separate locations. The difference between providers is almost never the central station — it is who designs the system, who installs it, who services it, and what the agreement says.
Free survey · No obligation
Bring us a written quote. We will beat it.
Any competitor, comparable scope, in writing. A licensed technician walks your property, maps the real entry points and gives you a fixed number — whether or not you hire us.
TX DPS PSB Lic. #B16898 · Serving San Antonio, Austin, Houston & Dallas since 2010