Savings calculator / 8-door office
What access control really costs an 8-door office — and how to cut it.
For companies of roughly 75 to 250 people in leased office space. Where the money goes, what a replacement would cost for 8 doors, and what you keep by upgrading the system you already own instead.
What a 8-door office looks like
Eight doors usually means a full floor or two: several entrances from lift lobbies and stairs, comms and IDF rooms on each floor, and a handful of secured rooms. It is also common for a company at this size to run a second, smaller site.
Access is now a real operational system. Facilities or IT owns it, there are rules by team and by floor, and evacuations involve wardens, assembly points and a list that has to be right.
The replacement quote, in numbers
Kisi’s published 2026 cost breakdown gives per-door ranges for a new system. Multiplied out for 8 doors:
Source: Kisi, breakdown of access control system installation costs ($600–$1,500 reader and hardware, $500–$1,500 installation with working locks, $600–$1,600 door licence per year, per door). Your quote may differ; these figures exclude new locks, wiring and per-user fees.
Where a 8-door office overpays today
Per-user and per-door charges at scale
Per-user credential fees across a hundred-plus people, and per-door licences if the system moves to a new platform, are recurring costs that compound every year.
Admin across floors and sites
Issuing, revoking and auditing access across several floors and a second site is hours of work every month when it runs on physical cards.
Evacuation accountability
With multiple stairs and exits, a muster that relies on badges in and memory out is slow and unreliable — exactly when it matters most.
What an upgrade changes
GateStride overlays the access control you already have. It adds a small node at each door, reads your system’s events and calls its own unlock. Your readers, controllers, locks, request-to-exit and fire release stay exactly as they are — so there is no replacement project and no new per-door platform licence.
- Phones instead of badges. Staff open doors with a phone, watch or tablet; nothing to print or hand back.
- No per-user growth. GateStride connects as one integration user and manages your people itself, so hiring stops adding per-user credential fees on the underlying system. Check your vendor’s licence terms with your integrator.
- Know who left. Exits are recorded from the phone people carry, without a swipe, so the last person out and the fire warden both know who is still inside. How exit tracking works.
Some systems charge per user, others per door. See who charges what, then put your own invoice figures into the calculator for 8 doors.
Before you accept a replacement quote
A replacement proposal is often the first number an office sees, and it is easy to accept it as the only route. Five questions to ask the integrator or vendor before you sign:
- What exactly is failing? Ask which components are unsupported, unreliable or out of parts. If the honest answer is “nothing, it just looks dated”, an upgrade may give you what you want.
- What will I pay every year after the install? Get per-door licences, per-user or per-credential fees, cloud subscriptions and support contracts in writing, for at least three years.
- Do the locks and wiring stay? Replacing locks, strikes and cabling is where installation cost climbs. Find out whether the quote assumes your existing door hardware.
- What happens to egress and fire release? Any change to how a door releases may need sign-off from your local fire or building authority. An overlay that leaves the release path alone avoids that question.
- Can you add phone access to what we have? Many integrators can — and if they install the system you already own, they can install GateStride on it too.
Then compare the replacement route with the upgrade route over three years, using the same assumptions. The calculator lays both side by side.
Questions about 8-door offices
- We have two sites. Does that change anything?
- No. GateStride manages every door and site from one center, with a per-site list of who is inside and one roll call per assembly point.
- What does replacing an 8-door system cost compared with upgrading it?
- Using Kisi’s published ranges, new readers and hardware plus installation with working locks come to roughly $8,800 to $24,000 for eight doors, plus $4,800 to $12,800 a year in door licences. An upgrade keeps your hardware; compare it against a GateStride quote.
- Where do these replacement figures come from?
- They multiply Kisi’s published 2026 per-door ranges — $600 to $1,500 for a reader and hardware, $500 to $1,500 for installation with working locks, and $600 to $1,600 a year for a basic door licence — by the number of doors. Your own quote may differ.
- Does GateStride change our locks or fire release?
- No. Locks, request-to-exit, fire release and certifications stay on your existing system. GateStride reads its events and calls its own unlock.
Other office sizes: 2-door office · 4-door office · custom
Check the numbers on your own doors
Tell us which access control you run and how many doors you have. We will show you what changes.