In 2020, the police department of picturesque Covington, Georgia, paid Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company, $40,000 to maintain 20 cameras around the city. The next year, it paid the same amount.

In 2022, that cost went up to $81,250. Fifteen new “Falcon” cameras, which Flock says have more sophisticated technology for reading license plates, accounted for $37,500. Another $3,750 went toward installing the new cameras, and the rest was spent maintaining the initial fleet.

Then, in 2024, the department paid Flock $113,225. Of that, $87,500 was to maintain its existing 35 cameras, a rate it agreed to pay for the next five years, and the remainder went toward eight new Falcon cameras. The next year, Covington paid Flock $159,000 for a combination of camera maintenance and enrollment in its Drone as First Responder program, which uses drones to fly to emergency scenes and stream footage back to the police station.

It’s unclear how much Covington will wind up paying Flock in 2026, but through August, it has paid $201,000—$100,000 to maintain its existing cameras, $800 to replace one, and another $100,200 for new software products. The Covington Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Overall, Flock is a small fraction of the Covington police department’s $12,488,733 budget for June 2025 to July 2026. But amid fierce blowback about Flock’s surveillance practices, contracts with the company are now being scrutinized in cities across the country. Flock did not provide a comment for this story.

WIRED obtained documents via public record request from a dozen Flock customers across the country and compared them to publicly available information from more than a dozen others. The documents shed light on how much Flock can actually cost communities, the way many of those deals are structured, and how the deals can expand over several years—leaving taxpayers on the hook year after year, with no end in sight.

“Once you let police officers try a tool,” says Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “it becomes really hard to get the political will and motivation to take that tool away from them.”How Flock Gets in the Door When Flock was founded in 2017, it originally sold its license plate readers to private homeowner associations (HOAs). By the time the company decided to sell to police departments in 2019, it had an in: Rather than starting a camera network from scratch, police could start by accessing the cameras that HOAs were already using.

A version of this story played out in Alpharetta, Georgia. In 2020, the city’s police department paid Flock $17,680 for five Falcon cameras ands for Flock software called Wing, which can extract vehicle and license plate data from off-brand camera footage. The next year, when Alpharetta bought a few more Flock cameras, a payment justification noted that “several” local private homeowner associations had already purchased Flock and granted them camera access.

“We are looking to add more city cameras into the Flock system,” the justification read. According to the city, “other vendors” would “not integrate with our existing Flock system.”Over the next several years, Alpharetta expanded its work with the company significantly. By 2025, the city’s annual Flock bill had ballooned to $381,000.

As in other industries, companies that sell technology to police often use financial incentives to get customers in the door. Clearview AI, Ring, and Taser have all ponied up enticing offers to agencies around the country.

“A lot of these police surveillance vendors have learned the lessons of general old salesmanship,” Guariglia tells WIRED. In other words, deals and discounts work.

In some cases, this looks like new and increasingly expansive Flock products. In 2025, for instance, Alpharetta paid for an upgrade to the Elite Package of FlockOS, which Flock describes as a real-time crime-center platform. Other products are first offered with a free trial; Alpharetta took advantage of one 90-day window last year to try a new product dubbed Nova.

Flock also expands its contracts by offering discounts if departments sign a multiyear contract. In 2024, Alpharetta locked into a five-year contract with Flock that would cost $254,250 the first year and $238,000 for each successive year. The agreement was $232,500 less than five one-year agreements, which could be subject to higher rates. The Alpharetta Police Department declined to comment.

Five-year agreements are common among Flock customers, which the company has sometimes marketed as a “price-lock promotion.”In a November 2023 email, Flock customer success manager Gwen Saltal used this framing to offer a five-year deal to New York’s Albany County Sheriff’s Office.

“As you may be aware, on April 1st, the cost of new Falcons went from $2,500 to $3,000, which will apply for future renewal terms on existing cameras as well,” Saltal wrote. “If you would like to lock in your current camera rates, Flock is offering a 5-year contract to hold that pricing.”The Albany County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

In other cities, Flock won long-term contracts because it offered a convenient product bundle. (This is far from exclusive to Flock; Motorola, for instance, recently inked a $54 million agreement with Louisiana for a slate of policing technology.) Guillermo Mixer, the police chief of the central California city of Greenfield, reported in a January city council meeting that the annual cost of the city’s surveillance system was $112,900, spread across five contracts with three companies: Flock, the surveillance camera company SurveillanceGrid, and the drone company Paladin.

Mixer proposed ditching SurveillanceGrid and Paladin and instead locking into a five-year contract with Flock. The annual cost would be $136,940—about $24,000 more than its level of spending at the time. He noted, however, that the price included three new cameras and access to Flock911, which transmits 911 call data to responding officers, as well as drones from Aerodrome, a company Flock acquired in 2024.

A proposed order form listed dozens of other Flock products and services included in the contract, though it’s unclear how many of those were new additions.

In the end, Greenfield’s city council unanimously approved Mixer’s repackaged Flock contract. Mixer and the Greenfield Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

What Your Money Gets You WIRED reviewed a July 2022 “Public Sector Price Sheet” for Flock products for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in Florida. Though it was generated for one specific agency, it reflects the approximate price ranges WIRED observed in Flock purchase orders around that time from around the country.

Historically, Flock has placed agencies into one of 14 pricing “buckets” for its software, depending on their size. Agencies in “Bucket 1” have one to 15 sworn officers and could pay as little as $2,000 or as much as $115,500 for Flock software, depending on whether they get a basic package or select multiple add-ons. The costs by bucket incrementally increase until Bucket 14—which is for state and federal agencies, or local forces with more than 3,000 officers—which the sheet says gets “custom” rates.

Hardware, meanwhile, tends to be sold at flat annual rates. According to the pricing sheet, individual license plate readers and surveillance cameras cost $3,000 to $5,200 per year, not including the cost of initial installation—which can run between $150 and $2,750 upfront.

The pricing sheet puts Flock’s individual gunshot detectors at $8,500 to $35,000 annually, depending on their range. The cost for its individual drones, meanwhile, is $50,000 to $150,000 per year, and Flock’s two “mobile security trailer” offerings cost $20,000 and $25,000 annually. Fort Lauderdale police did not respond to a request for comment.

Though prices vary depending on the size of a purchase and individual negotiations with a city, Flock’s pricing appears to be comparable to its competitors. Axon recently quoted Denver $150,000 to install 50 cameras across the city and maintain them for one year, while Motorola recently charged Manti, Utah, $4,704 for a single license plate reader.

Flock also has a pricing plan for replacing damaged or stolen products—a particularly relevant concern amid a national wave of vandalism targeting Flock cameras. Per Flock contract conditions, the company retains ownership of the products it sells to cities. This means that when people damage or destroy cameras, cities are on the hook for the cost. (It also means that if a city decides to end their Flock contract, they have to give the equipment back.)

According to Flock’s website and invoices reviewed by WIRED, the company has flat rates for replacing damaged or stolen products: $800 for cameras, $500 for poles, and $1,300 for both. (This is up from its 2021 pricing, according to documents from Anderson County, South Carolina, when its replacement cost was $500 for cameras and $150 for poles.) Some cities have gone out of their way to draw attention to the fiscal toll of replacing damaged Flock equipment—sometimes overstating the cost in the process.

Police from Winona, Minnesota, and Rutherfordton, North Carolina, have said that camera replacements cost $3,000 and $3,500 each, respectively—or $2,200 and $2,700 higher than the listed cost. And in Derby, Kansas, after a man damaged 10 Flock cameras, local police claimed that he caused $26,000 in damages. But depending on whether he damaged the poles, replacements likely would have cost $8,000 to $13,000. Police from Winona, Rutherfordton, and Derby did not respond to a request for comment.

Flock’s pricing, ultimately, is much lower than other department expenses—like police helicopters, which can cost tens of millions of dollars annually, or hiring more police officers. Still, when compared to other technology-related expenses, Flock spending can stand out.

In Pasadena, Texas, which has a population of about 148,500, the 2026 police budget allotted $427,133 for Flock, $500,842 for body camera software, and $500,000 for "Motorola maintenance." These were, by far, the most expensive technology purchases. Most of the other purchases had budgets of less than $100,000. The Pasadena Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Why Some Customers Are Ditching Flock Across the country, cities big and small have chosen to increase their Flock spending significantly over just a few years. Savannah, Georgia, for instance, paid $33,000 for Flock in 2020 and $193,500 in 2025. Snellville, Georgia, paid Flock $5,000 in 2021 and 2022; in 2025, it paid $163,275. This year, as of August, the city has paid Flock $138,934.94.

The Savannah and Snellville Police Departments did not respond to requests for comment.

However, in some cases, Flock’s pricing eventually proved to be prohibitive. Jack Hall—the sheriff of Lorain County, Ohio—recently announced that the county would be canceling its Flock contract.

Hall said that Flock planned to raise Lorain County’s two-year rate for 15 cameras by 17 percent.

For him, it was too much. Hall and the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office did not respond for comment. Killingworth, Connecticut, also decided to end its relationship with Flock. The town paid $14,600 last year for four cameras. Killingworth first selectman Eric Couture noted “privacy concerns” related to Flock and said that it didn’t provide much to police relative to its cost.

Couture told WIRED that Flock’s cost wasn’t entirely prohibitive. But, he added, the cameras “did not add any utility” for the town’s “resident state trooper.”