Fleet-camera demos are impressive on purpose. The dashboard is polished, the sample clips are dramatic, and the salesperson has an answer for everything you think to ask. The problems live in the questions you don't think to ask. Here are the five that matter: ask them of every vendor, and get the answers in writing.
1. How long is the contract, and what does it cost to leave early?
Not "is there a discount for committing", ask for the total term and the exact dollar cost of canceling at month 12. In much of this industry the answer is the full remaining balance of a multi-year agreement, which means a disappointing product still gets paid in full. Ask whether the agreement auto-renews and how far in advance you must cancel to avoid another term.
A vendor confident in its product doesn't need to lock the exits. If the honest answer to "what if this doesn't work out?" is "you pay us anyway," weigh that heavily.
2. Who owns the footage, and how do I retrieve it?
The footage exists to protect you, so pin down the mechanics: How long are clips retained? Can you download and share them yourself, or does retrieval go through a support request? Is there a fee to pull historical video? And the question nobody asks until it's too late, if you cancel the service, do you keep access to footage recorded while you were a customer?
The test that cuts through vague answers: "Walk me through sharing a clip with my insurance adjuster within an hour of a crash." If the answer involves an SD card, a mailed device, or a support ticket with a three-day turnaround, the footage won't be there when you need it most.
3. What's the real install time per vehicle?
Every install hour is a revenue hour lost, multiplied across the fleet. Ask what the installation actually involves, how long it takes per vehicle in practice, not in the brochure, and who does the work. Ask whether installs can be scheduled around your operation, in your yard, instead of your trucks queuing at a shop across town on a workday.
Ask what happens later, too: if you replace a truck, what does moving the camera cost, and does it restart any contract term?
4. Who answers the support call?
At small-fleet size, you will not be anyone's biggest customer, so find out how vendors treat their smallest ones. Is support a phone number with a human on it, or a ticket portal with a seven-day SLA? What are the hours, and what happens when a camera dies on a Friday afternoon? The simplest due diligence in this industry: call the support line before you sign and see how long it takes to reach a person. That's your preview of life as a customer.
5. What happens to the price at renewal?
The introductory number on the quote is not the number that matters: the renewal number is. Ask whether the monthly rate is locked, what it becomes when the initial period ends, and whether the vendor can raise prices mid-term. Multi-year deals with sharp renewal increases are how a reasonable-looking quote becomes an unreasonable line item in year four, when leaving has already been made expensive.
How AirIQ answers these five
For the record, here's our own scorecard: AirIQ is month-to-month with no early-termination fee, so the cost of leaving is zero. Your footage is yours, shareable by secure web link from your dashboard in minutes, not days. Installation is professional and scheduled around your operation, not ours. Support means reaching real people who've supported fleets since 1997. And the price you sign at is the price: no renewal cliff, because there's no contract to renew. Ask every vendor the same five questions, and compare the answers side by side.