A visitor book holds less data than a shared calendar. A name, who they came to see, when they arrived, when they left. The whole thing fits in one table.
It is also a category with its own vendors, its own tiers, and a bill that arrives every year for as long as the building has a front door.
That gap — between how small the problem is and how the software is priced — is worth looking at directly, with the vendors' own numbers rather than anyone's characterization of them.
What two vendors publish
Sign In App prices by site, annually. Their pricing page lists three tiers (read 22 August 2026):
'Core' … '£415 per site / year' … 'Enhanced' … '£835 per site / year' … 'Pro' … '£1255 per site / year'
Re-read on 5 September 2026 all three held, and two things appeared that the August reading had not recorded. There is a fourth tier, Executive, priced only as "Contact Sales for quote" — so even the vendor that publishes its ladder most plainly stops publishing at the top, which is the pattern the quote-gating census counts. And there is a 15-day trial with no credit card required, which is the honest way to try one of these before committing a year.
More usefully, the page defines its own meter in a single sentence, and it is worth quoting exactly:
"Each location or office with a different postcode or zip code requires its own site subscription."
That is an unusually precise rule, and precision is a kindness here. It tells a reader with two buildings on one industrial estate to check their postcodes before budgeting, and it tells a reader with one office and three floors that they are buying one subscription. Most per-site pricing leaves you to discover the boundary during a sales call.
Envoy prices its Visitors product by location, monthly, on an annual commitment (read 22 August 2026):
'$362' … 'per location/month billed annually'
Both figures were read from those vendors' own pricing pages on 22 August 2026. Envoy also publishes a free Basic tier — 'Free' 'With limited features' — which is the honest starting point for one quiet reception, and worth saying plainly before any arithmetic. A quoted Enterprise tier sits above Premium (all re-read 5 September 2026, every figure unchanged).
The arithmetic, labeled as arithmetic
Neither vendor published a three-year total; the multiplication below is ours.
One site on Sign In App Core is £415 a year, so £1,245 over three years. Two sites is £2,490. The tier ladder is separate from that: needing a feature from Enhanced doubles the annual figure before you have added a second building.
Envoy Visitors Premium at $362 per location per month is $4,344 a year for one reception, and $13,032 over three. A second location is another $4,344 a year.
Visitora is $79. Once. For that site, for as many visitors as walk through it, for as long as the server runs. It is one of the four products in the Front-Desk Suite and one of the four in the Studio Suite; the demo is open without a sign-up.
Try the Visitora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
What the meter is counting
This is the part that matters more than any single figure, because it decides what happens as you grow.
Sign In App meters by site, and now we can say exactly what a site is: any "location or office with a different postcode or zip code."
Envoy meters by location, and separately by product — and the 5 September 2026 re-read put figures against the other meters, which the earlier reading had named without pricing: Response at $2 per user per month, Reservations at $5 per bookable resource per month, Screens at $12 per device per month, and Deliveries at $250 per delivery location per month, each billed annually.
Put two of those together for a single front desk and the shape becomes clear. Visitors Premium at $362 and Deliveries at $250 is $612 a month — $7,344 a year — for one reception, before a single user, desk or screen is counted. Add a screen in the lobby and twenty staff on Response and it is $664 a month, $7,968 a year. The visitor book is one of several meters running in the same building, and this is what "several" costs.
Neither is metering the thing that actually varies. A reception that signs in four people a day and one that signs in four hundred pay the same. What you are buying is permission for the door to exist.
What you are actually buying at that price
The expensive tiers are not expensive because visitor sign-in is hard. They are expensive because the category has been extended into a workplace platform: desk booking, room panels, delivery handling, badge printing at scale, directory sync, analytics.
If you want that platform, it is a real product and the price is a real trade. Buy it.
If what you need is the sign-in book and the answer to one question during a fire drill, you are renting a platform to get a table.
The one question the book exists for
Every visitor system justifies itself on the same scenario, and it is the right one: the alarm goes, everybody walks out, and somebody has to say whether the contractor who arrived at eleven is still inside.
That moment is also where the software usually fails, for a reason nobody plans for. The fire alarm and the network going down are not independent events, and the evacuation list is the one screen that must survive the second one.
Visitora keeps the evacuation page on the device. If the network is gone it still shows the list as of its last load. There is also a one-click printed muster sheet with a tick box per row, because paper beats every screen at two percent battery. That is not a feature list — it is what "who is still inside" costs if you take the question seriously.
The honest trade
Visitora does not unlock doors, encode badges, scan ID, take a photo, send push notifications, or cover more than one site per installation. None of that is a roadmap item; it is the shape of the product, and it is written on its own page rather than discovered afterward. Email goes through your own SMTP server and, since Own It 4.1, a host who asks for it gets a text through your own SMS gateway; both are off until you switch them on, and Visitora sells no credits for either.
The reason to say so here is that the comparison only means something if both halves are true. Sign In App and Envoy do a great deal that Visitora does not. What they also do is charge for the door, every year, forever.
Where this lands
If you run twenty sites and want one vendor account across all of them, an annual per-site license is a reasonable way to buy that, and the platform features are worth something real.
If you run one site — a studio, a workshop, a serviced office, a school reception — you are looking at £415 or $4,344 a year to record names and answer one question during a drill.
The alternative is one payment, on your own server, with the visitor data never leaving it. That is the whole argument, and the numbers above are the vendors' own. The workforce stack and the fire-roll-call question are where this register sits beside the others.
Prices transcribed from signinapp.com/pricing and envoy.com/pricing on 22 August 2026. Vendor pricing changes; the totals above are arithmetic over those published figures, not quotes.