A facilities manager asked me for one number. I gave him a dollar forty per square meter. Then he asked what was in it, and the meeting got long.
The beacon is the cheapest part
A Beacon runs three to eight dollars depending on the battery and the housing. At one per twenty-five square meters — a normal density for asset tracking — that’s twelve to thirty cents per square meter. The hardware line is the one everybody negotiates, and it’s the smallest number on the page.
Labor is the line nobody budgets
Here’s where the money actually goes. Two installers in an occupied building mount sixty to eighty units a day once you count the ladder, the access requests, and the waiting for a forklift to move. At seven hundred dollars a day for the crew, that’s roughly ten dollars per unit installed, or about forty cents a square meter. More than the beacon itself, and unlike the beacon it doesn’t get cheaper when you buy in bulk.
Gateways, and the network drops they need
A gateway is eighty to two hundred and fifty dollars, and one covers three hundred to six hundred square meters depending on how much metal is in the room. Call it fifteen to eighty cents per square meter. Then someone has to get power to it. With PoE that’s a cable and a switch port; without it, it’s an electrician, which is worse. Budget ten to forty cents a square meter for the drops and expect the number to be wrong the first time.
The survey nobody puts in the plan
Someone has to walk the building, decide where each unit goes, and then come back and fix the eleven places the model was wrong. On a mid-size site that’s a week of a competent person’s time, and it’s the most-skipped line item I see. Skipping it doesn’t save the money. It just moves the cost into year two, when you re-hang everything.
Batteries are an operating cost, not a purchase
A Beacon on a coin cell lasts one to three years. On a ten thousand square meter site with four hundred units, that’s four hundred batteries on a rotation plus the labor to swap them — about ten cents per square meter per year, and it never goes away. The teams that model this as a one-time capital purchase are the ones calling us in month twenty.
Software is a subscription
Call it five to thirty cents per square meter per year depending on whether you buy a platform or build one. Building it is rarely cheaper once you count the person who has to maintain it, but people try anyway, and I understand why: the subscription is the number that shows up every year in a way a battery doesn’t.
A worked example
Ten thousand square meters, mixed office and light industrial. Hardware around two thousand dollars. Install labor around four thousand. Gateways and network roughly four thousand five hundred. Survey and commissioning three thousand. Software fifteen hundred a year, batteries a thousand a year. Year one lands somewhere between twelve and twenty-four thousand dollars — call it a dollar twenty to two forty per square meter, all in.
The two things that move the number most
Accuracy target first. Room-level tracking is one Beacon per twenty-five square meters; anything approaching sub-meter positioning needs roughly four times that density plus surveyed anchors, and the labor scales with it. Second is the building itself. Steel racking, concrete shear walls, and a mezzanine all push density up. A clean open-plan office and a busy workshop with identical floor areas can differ by a factor of three.
What I’d tell the facilities manager
Ask for the all-in number, not the per-tag price. A vendor quoting you two dollars for a beacon is answering a question you didn’t ask. A Beacon is the cheapest part of a beacon project, and that sentence has ended more than one budget conversation early — which is exactly its job.
