Over at CountingCars.com, the City of Jamestown in North Dakota invited us to provide a bid for four tube counters (with accessories). Â We just found out we won the bid. Â This was a nice process for us because it gave us pricing from our competitors. Â We’re an online store with transparent pricing – you have to call them to get pricing. Â We’re surprised at how expensive they are (but this doesn’t mean we’re raising our prices).
Bid Results:
| Firm | Base Bid | Alternate 1 | Alternate 2 |
| 4 Volume Counters | 2 Volume Counters 2 Classifier Counters |
4 Classifier Counters | |
| CountingCars.com | $2,200.79 | $2,200.79 | $2,200.79 |
| Competitor 1 | $3,723.40 | $3,723.40 | $3,723.40 |
| Competitor 2 | $3,251.00 | $4,051.00 | $4,651.00 |
| Competitor 3 | No Bid | No Bid | $7,302.00 |
| Note:Â Bids include shipping, tubes, software, and all accessories to make counters operational. – Find out more: PicoCounter.com | |||
UPDATE – I originally had the names of the companies in this post, but removed them based on a request from city staff.  They appreciate all of us spending the time to submit a bid and didn’t want to negatively impact our competitors.  Feel free to shoot Paul an email (sales@countingcars.com) and he’ll share the bid tab with you – it is public information.
You’ll notice our bid price is the same for the base bid and the alternate bids. Â That’s because our counters come right out of the box providing volumes, classifications, and speeds. Â You’ll also notice we’re 40% cheaper than the next comparable product. Â But what’s really mind-blowing is that we are 70% cheaper than Competitor 3.
We responded to Jamestown’s specific request of items, but the thing to note is that you don’t have to go through a bid process to get great pricing from us. Â You can just go to our online store and get discount pricing on a host of different packages.
Right now, you can go buy the four counter package with all of the tubes software and accessories you need for $1,999. Â (The above Jamestown bid includes extra accessories and shipping, which bumped our price up a couple hundred dollars.)
They are a great deal, and the gathering of raw data with software manipulation is a much better technology than setting it up on the counter beforehand. As long as you don’t need them for low volume directional volume-only counts with two hoses all the way across the road/drive. The ability to filter out pure axle-hits by hose hit sequence is why I have had to go back to the competitors, despite the price difference.
Adam, did you try checking the boxes for “spacing unknown” and “directional volume only” in the traffic viewer software?
Try that for your volume only directional volume counts.