If you’ve priced visitor management software for a small office recently, you’ve probably had the same experience I did before I started building it. You open a pricing page expecting a sign-in screen and a host notification. You find a “workplace platform” with desk booking, room displays, emergency threat feeds, analytics dashboards and an enterprise tier with “contact sales” where the price should be.
None of that is bad software. It’s just built for a different customer. A 20-person accounting firm, a dental practice or a property management office has a front desk, a handful of visitors a day, and someone who also answers the phone, signs for packages and orders the coffee.
I’m Gilles, and I build frontkiosk. This is what I learned about what that office actually uses, and the features we decided not to build.
The price problem is real, and it’s not just the number
Envoy’s public pricing page lists Visitors Premium at $362 per location per month, billed annually, as of October 6, 2026. That’s the tier where badge printing, visitor photos and legal documents sit (Envoy pricing). Other vendors in the category price annually and per site. Reviews of SwipedOn and Sign In App put their pricing at annual, per-site plans starting from $630 per year per site (Archie review, Hybrid Hero review).
Reviewers say the same thing in different words. GetApp’s summary notes that reviewers find Envoy’s price steep, especially for small businesses (GetApp). G2’s AI summary of Envoy’s cons starts with cost (G2). A TrustRadius reviewer says the pricing changed and now targets enterprise customers (TrustRadius).
The number matters, but the bigger issue is the shape of the pricing. When the badge printer is a premium feature and controls over which visitor responses you retain sit in the upper tiers, a small office has to work out which tier it needs before it can find out what it’ll pay. A thread in r/Workplace_Management asking for Envoy alternatives sums up the frustration: people describe the app as slow, the pricing as confusing, and the product as having grown bloated with features (Reddit). In r/sysadmin, someone asking what visitor system people use said, in short, that they needed the simplest thing possible (Reddit).
That request stuck with me. It’s a product spec.
The four jobs a small front desk actually needs
When I watched small front desks work, the same four jobs came up again and again.
1. Sign the visitor in
Name, company if it matters, who they’re here to see, and a timestamp. It should take seconds, without an app download or a visitor account. Every field you add is time a person spends standing at the counter while the receptionist waits.
2. Tell the host
This is the job most people actually care about. The visitor wants someone to know they’ve arrived. The host wants to know before the visitor has been sitting in the lobby for ten minutes. An email to the host the moment the visitor signs in solves most of this for a small office. If the receptionist is on the phone, the system still does its job.
3. Give them a badge, if you use badges
Not every office needs badges. A 10-person office where everyone knows everyone may not. But when you have contractors in the back, or patients and vendors sharing a hallway, a printed name badge helps staff tell who’s a guest. It should print right after sign-in without anyone touching a settings screen.
4. Know who’s here right now
A live list of who has signed in and hasn’t left. On a normal day this answers “is my 2:00 still here?” During a fire alarm it’s the list you need at the assembly point, which is why the fire-drill roll call matters so much.
That’s it. Almost everything a 20-person office asks of a visitor system fits into those four jobs. The rest is nice to have, or it belongs to a different product.
What we refused to build
Every one of these was a real conversation. Some of them are useful features in the right setting. We left them out because each one would have made the four core jobs slower, more expensive or harder to set up for the office we were building for.
Desk and room booking. It’s a different problem with different users. Visitor sign-in is used by strangers at the front door. Desk booking is used by employees at their desks. Putting both in one product makes the admin screens longer for people who only want one of them.
Threat intelligence feeds. Some vendors now bundle feeds of crime, weather and civil unrest near your locations. For a multinational with traveling staff, that may make sense. For a dental practice on one floor of a strip mall, it’s noise.
SSO tiers and directory sync as an upsell. Large companies need single sign-on, and enterprise pricing reflects that. Small offices usually have a handful of people who need admin access. We didn’t want SSO locked behind a contact-sales enterprise tier, so we kept it out of the core product, and none of the four core jobs depend on it.
Visitor accounts. If a visitor has to create a login, download an app or verify an email address before they can say “I’m here for my 10:00,” the sign-in is broken. The visitor is a guest, not a user.
Extra screens. This was the biggest lesson. Every optional question, survey or acknowledgment screen we tried added friction at the counter. A visitor with a coat on and a bag in hand doesn’t want to tap through five screens. A short flow is a feature, even if it’s a hard one to put on a pricing page.
How to evaluate any visitor system for a small office
Whatever you end up buying, these questions cut through most of the noise:
- Can you see the full price without a sales call? If you can’t, the product probably wasn’t built for you.
- Are badges, the host alert and the who’s-here list in the plan you’d actually buy? Check that these aren’t add-ons.
- How long does a visitor spend at the screen? Try it yourself with a coat on and a phone in one hand.
- Does it need specific hardware? Some systems require an iPad. Envoy’s FAQ, for example, says Visitors needs one (Envoy pricing). If you already own a different tablet or a spare laptop, that matters.
- Can you export your own data? Vendors in this category change owners regularly. A clean export protects you whatever happens.
- Who sets it up? If the answer is “IT,” and you don’t have IT, keep looking.
Where we ended up
Keeping the scope to four jobs is what let us price frontkiosk the way we did. The Lifetime plan is a $250 one-time payment for a single front desk (or you can pay monthly at $29 per location): visitors sign in on a tablet or in a browser, the host gets an email, badges print, and you get a live who’s-on-site list and a fire-drill roll call.
If you’d like to see whether that’s enough for your front desk, there’s a short demo at frontkiosk.net/demo. It walks through a sign-in, the host email, the badge, the on-site list and the roll call. Even if you buy something else, it’s a useful benchmark for what “simple” can look like.
Full plan details are in the pricing section. Every plan is paid.