Footfall & Dwell Time: your cameras are already counters

What it does

Point it at the door camera's footage and it reads the whole timeline, then writes the tallies up as a document: entries by hour from the door camera, dwell by area from the floor cameras, the quiet Tuesday and the swamped Saturday as numbers rather than folklore. If you've been pricing up beam sensors or dedicated counting cameras, this is the version where the counting is done by the CCTV that's already on the wall.

What you get

A written report, on screen and by email, and a JSON webhook if you'd rather feed the spreadsheet or reporting tool you already use. Because it all sits on Svid's search, you can also just ask the footage things in plain English, like how busy the entrance was at four o'clock, and get an answer without opening a report at all.

Decisions it feeds

• Matching staff rotas to the actual busy hours, rather than to everyone's memory of them.
• Seeing whether the window change moved people to the new display, or just moved the display.
• Comparing dwell at the promotion bay in the week before and the week after.
• Knowing conversion's denominator without buying a separate counter for every door.

The sibling to keep straight is Queue Length. That's an alerting check, judging recent frames as they arrive so someone opens a till in the next sixty seconds. This one reads the whole video afterwards and writes the patterns down, counts you read weekly to decide rotas and layout. Same cameras, opposite time horizons. Shrinkage Heatmap is the loss-flavoured cousin, another report check: it maps where incidents cluster, while this maps where people go.

Where it runs

Per camera, so the door camera counts entries while a floor camera measures dwell at a fixture, and the stockroom camera does neither. It works on RTSP captures, uploads, and a phone camera propped over a second entrance, and reports run happily at the Economy watch level (a frame every 15 seconds), which keeps the cost down. A fully on-prem appliance mode exists for footage that can't leave the building. On privacy: it counts and times people, it doesn't identify or follow them, and Svid has no facial recognition anywhere.

What it costs

The Store shows Footfall & Dwell Time with a live monthly figure computed from your own usage before you buy, ‘+$X/mo at your usage’, and report checks like this one are priced from a $3 a month floor. The subscription it joins is priced from your own usage with a $9 a month minimum, and the whole derivation is on screen at signup. The pricing section has the arithmetic.

Do I need to buy people-counting sensors or special cameras?

No. It runs on the CCTV already covering your door and floor. That's the whole point of it: the counting hardware you were about to price up is the camera you already own.

What's the difference between footfall and dwell time?

Footfall is how many people came in. Dwell time is how long they stayed in an area. Together they tell you where attention actually goes, which is usually not quite where anyone guessed.

Can it tell staff from customers?

It describes what it sees, so obvious signals like a uniform can be part of a plain-English query. But it doesn't identify individuals, and the counts are of people, not verified customers.