If you’ve just moved into a house in Cascais, a Verisure or Prosegur rep will probably get to you before your furniture does. The pitch is a monthly fee, a free install and a panel on the wall. What you’re actually signing is a two- or three-year contract for hardware that only works with the company that sold it to you.
There’s a better way to do this in Portugal, and the law is more on your side than the sales reps let on. You can own your equipment outright, see everything from your own phone, and add professional monitoring from an independent company later if you want it. The regulations spell out how that works, including one step you can’t skip.
What the Big Alarm Companies Actually Sell
Verisure advertises monitoring from €37 a month plus VAT, which is about €45.50 with 23% IVA, on a 24-month fidelização. Equipment and installation prices aren’t published at all. You get a figure after a home “security study”, and the fee can rise with inflation each year. The residential terms aren’t public either, but the business contract Verisure publishes (it trades legally as Securitas Direct Portugal) shows the structure: 24 months, then automatic 12-month renewals unless you cancel by registered letter at least 30 days before the term ends. The equipment is sold with reservation of title, so it stays theirs until the contract is fully paid.
Prosegur doesn’t publish prices or terms. Its complaint file on DECO Proteste fills in the gaps. One complaint from March 2026 describes a 36-month term the customer says was never disclosed, sold by phone, and a €1,581.83 charge to leave early. Another customer paid for the hardware and then found it useless outside Prosegur’s own systems. On DECO’s complaints portal Prosegur Alarmes scores 50 out of 100 across 173 complaints and Securitas Direct 62 out of 100 across 157, and the themes repeat: tacit renewal, refused cancellations, things the salesperson promised.
NOS Securitas, a separate company, is at least upfront about it. NOS lists €39.99 to €49.99 a month with free installation, but the equipment is rented and the initial term is 36 months.
The alarms themselves work. What costs you is the model: you pay for the kit many times over, you can’t take it with you to a cheaper monitoring provider, and leaving early costs you the remaining months.
Route One: Total Control With UniFi or eufy
My first recommendation is a setup where you own everything and nothing depends on a contract. Cameras record to a box in your house, sensors and sirens report to your phone, and you decide who gets notified. You are the monitoring center.
UniFi is what I’d pick if you care about doing it properly. UniFi Protect runs on a local console with its own storage and no subscription, the cameras are excellent, and Ubiquiti now sells a full set of alarm sensors that plug into the same app. On the EU store a SuperLink gateway is €152.52, door sensors €43.05, motion sensors €54.12 and a 110 dB siren €130.38. G6 Bullet cameras are €237.39 each. A realistic villa setup with a Cloud Gateway Fiber, four cameras, eight door contacts, four motion sensors, a siren and a keyfob comes to around €2,200, plus a PoE switch and a hard drive. If you also run UniFi for your Wi-Fi, it’s all one system.
eufy is the cheaper, easier route. Battery cameras, no cabling, and local storage on a HomeBase (the S380 is €249 and takes up to 16 TB). A three-camera eufyCam S3 Pro kit with the HomeBase is €779 and a five-piece alarm kit is €142.99, so a house can be covered for roughly €1,000 to €1,200. It’s the right choice for a rental where you can’t run cable through the walls.
eufy comes with history you should know about. In late 2022 a researcher showed that eufy cameras sold as “local only” were uploading thumbnails to the cloud, and that live streams could be opened without encryption. Anker admitted the streams weren’t end-to-end encrypted and promised fixes and outside audits, and in January 2025 the New York Attorney General settled with eufy’s US distributors for $450,000 and required a formal security program. I’d still use it, with the cameras outside the house and not in bedrooms.
The trade-off with this route is response. When the siren goes off at 3am while you’re on a plane, it’s your phone that buzzes. UniFi and eufy don’t hold EN 50131 certification, so they can’t legally be connected to a Portuguese monitoring center as an intrusion alarm. UniFi Protect added SIA DC-09 reporting in version 7.1.60, so the protocol is there, but the certification isn’t. eufy’s professional monitoring is US-only.
Route Two: Own the Kit, Rent Only the Monitoring
If you travel a lot or the house sits empty for weeks, you probably want someone else answering the alarm. You can have that without the lock-in.
Portugal’s alarm rules are in Portaria 273/2013, and they explicitly allow for a system that the monitoring company didn’t install. Article 59(5) says that when the installation wasn’t done by the company with the monitoring license (an alvará C), that company must ask the user for a copy of the system manual and the installation declaration before connecting the alarm. Article 111 sets the standard: a home alarm connected to a monitoring center has to be EN 50131 Grade 2.
The step you can’t skip is the installation declaration. Only an installer registered with the PSP can issue it (Lei 34/2013, article 4-A), and doing that work without registration carries fines of €300 to €1,500 for an individual. So the realistic path is: buy your own Grade 2 kit, have a registered installer fit or commission it and sign the declaration, then contract any monitoring center you like. The rules don’t require the installer to be the one who sold you the equipment. The law also requires an in-person maintenance visit once a year by a licensed or registered company, and on this route you arrange and pay for that yourself.
Ajax is the kit I’d use. The Hub 2 Plus is certified to Grade 2, reports to monitoring centers over SIA DC-09 and Contact ID, has Ethernet, Wi-Fi and two SIM slots, and it’s sold everywhere in Portugal from Worten to specialist distributors. At Aguedatronic’s current prices the hub is €345, motion detectors €62, door contacts €34, an outdoor siren €120.54 and the keypad €106. A villa with six motion detectors, ten door contacts, indoor and outdoor sirens, a keypad, two fobs and a smoke detector comes to about €1,480 in hardware, before installer labor.
Ajax is also the option that keeps you in total control. You own the hardware, you can switch monitoring providers whenever you like, and Home Assistant’s SIA integration can receive the same alarm events locally while the monitoring center gets them. It pairs well with UniFi Protect cameras: UniFi for video, Ajax for intrusion.
Independent Monitoring Centers Around Cascais
These are the companies I found that advertise monitoring for systems they didn’t sell. None publish prices, so expect to call for a quote.
SOC Segurança Privada is based in Cascais and mainly covers Cascais, Oeiras, Sintra and Lisbon. It monitors compatible third-party systems for intrusion, CCTV with video verification, fire and technical events, with a response protocol you set individually, and it’ll check compatibility before you sign. Guard dispatch is an optional add-on.
INV Proteção in Lisbon runs its own monitoring center with video verification and mobile response, and says it can connect an alarm from another company after a compatibility visit.
Redguardman in Amadora runs a 24/7 center for residential alarms and CCTV. Ask whether they’ll take a system they didn’t install.
The Rules That Apply Either Way
A few obligations apply whether you go with a big provider, your own monitored kit, or a UniFi setup that only you watch.
Any alarm with a siren audible from outside has to be reported to the local police within five working days of installation, with the contact details of keyholders. In Cascais that’s the PSP’s Cascais division, and the PSP publishes the form. If the police call you about it, you or a keyholder must turn up and reset it within two hours. Failing to do either is a fine of €300 to €1,500.
Cheap GSM alarms that auto-dial 112 with a recorded message are banned. Three false alarms from the same system within 60 days means the monitoring center has to suspend the connection, and police can charge a fee for attending a false alarm.
The strict reading of Article 111 is that even an unmonitored alarm with a siren should be certified to Grade 1, which UniFi and eufy aren’t. I haven’t seen any sign it’s enforced, but it’s in the text.
Cameras don’t need any authorization for a private home, but the CNPD, Portugal’s data protection authority, is clear that they can’t cover the public street or a neighbor’s property. Point them at your own gate, drive and garden, and use privacy masking where the field of view spills over. In a condominium you need every resident’s consent.
Connectivity and Power
An alarm that reports over your fiber line stops reporting when the fiber goes down or someone cuts it at the box outside. The Ajax Hub 2 Plus fails over to a SIM card on its own. With UniFi, a gateway with a mobile backup and a small UPS on the console and PoE switch keeps cameras recording through a power cut, which after the April 2025 blackout isn’t a theoretical worry here. I’ve written about which internet and mobile provider I use in Portugal, and a low-cost data SIM is all a backup needs. If you’re still setting up the house, my guide to getting utilities connected in Portugal covers the rest.
How Much Risk Are We Talking About
Burglary in Portugal has been falling for years. The government’s latest annual internal security report, RASI 2025, counts 7,546 forced-entry home burglaries nationally, down 4.3% on the year before, and credits wider use of home security technology for part of the long decline. Lisbon district has the largest share, at 19%. The same report highlights armed robberies at luxury villas in 2025 that were preceded by surveillance, including by drone, which is the risk profile of a detached house in the Cascais hills rather than an apartment in town.
That’s the case for doing this properly without overpaying for it. Own the hardware, keep the footage in your house, and if you want a professional on the other end, rent the monitoring on its own and keep the right to walk away.
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