Sell footfall counting to independent shops with an AI camera that stores no images
Big retailers know how many people walk in every hour; independent shops know their till total and nothing else. A £200 box of AI over the door counts people in and out, throws every frame away, and leaves the owner a weekly heatmap of busy and dead hours. Build the counter, the privacy pack the shop needs, and a 30-day pilot that turns into a monthly fee.
- A deployable box: a mini PC or Raspberry Pi 5 that starts the counter on boot
- A business kit: parts list, pricing and payback calculator, privacy pack, pilot offer and scripts
- A small PC: Intel N150 mini PC with 16GB RAM (around £150 to £200), or a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB kit (around £110 to £130) for one door
- A camera with an RTSP stream: many shops already have one, or a Tapo C120 (around £30 to £40) or a PoE camera (around £50 to £70)
- Python 3.11 to 3.13 and basic terminal skills: Terminal survival kit
- For practice: any laptop and a short video of people walking
What shops buy: the numbers behind their till total
Know exactly what you're selling before you build it: decisions, not a camera.
A shop owner knows they took £1,400 on Saturday. They don't know if that was 400 visitors buying a little or 150 buying a lot. That gap hides the most useful questions in retail: are we understaffed at lunchtime? Did the window display bring people in? Is the late Thursday opening worth it? Why do Sundays convert so badly? Footfall answers them, and almost no independent shop has it.
What you delivera small computer and a camera above the entrance that count people in and out every 15 minutes, a weekly one-page summary, and a short monthly note with one recommendation. The shop pays a setup fee and a monthly fee.
The deliverable: generated by the kit's weekly_report.py from a sample week of counts and till totals. Who buys itIndependent cafés, bakeries, gift shops, bike shops, garden centres, pharmacies, opticians, gyms, small museums and visitor centres. Best of all: owners with two to five sites, or a charity shop area manager, because they can compare shops for the first time.
Careful- What it takes. Capital: around £150 to £250 of hardware per shop, often recovered in the setup fee.
- Skills: you'll run Python on a small Linux or Windows box, set up a camera stream, and keep a handful of devices healthy.
- Hours: about 3 hours to install a site, then around an hour a month per site for checks and the monthly note.
- Insurance: public liability for working on premises and professional indemnity for advice.
- Time to first customer: commonly a few weeks, through a free 30-day pilot.
- Who this suits: someone technical who likes talking to shop owners, enjoys tidy installs, and wants a recurring-fee business that grows one high street at a time.
Everything is in the kit: Download the kit. The counter, the weekly summary script, a sample week of data, a boot service file, the parts list, a pricing and payback calculator, the privacy pack, and the pilot offer and scripts.