The Visibility Tax: Why You're Paying Legacy AV Vendors to See Your Own Data

Most enterprises have no idea whether their meeting rooms are working right now.

Not because the technology doesn't exist to tell them. But because the vendors who could tell them have built a business model around *not* telling them for free.

We call this the Visibility Tax.

What is the Visibility Tax?

The Visibility Tax is the practice of legacy AV vendors charging a premium subscription fee just to give you real-time visibility into the health of your own meeting room devices.

Cameras you bought. Codecs you licensed. Displays you installed. All running on your network. All generating device health data 24/7.

And someone is charging you to see it.

In a world where server monitoring is free (Datadog has a free tier, Grafana is open source, AWS CloudWatch ships with every account), the idea that you need to pay a legacy AV vendor $X per room per month just to know whether your camera is online is — frankly — embarrassing.

But it's real. And thousands of organizations are paying it.

How it happened

The Visibility Tax emerged because the meeting room technology market evolved backwards.

Hardware vendors built great cameras, codecs, and displays. Then they built proprietary management consoles. Then they locked the health data inside those consoles. Then they charged for access.

The result: if you run a mixed fleet — Teams Rooms on some hardware, Webex on others, Zoom on a third set — you need three separate consoles, three separate subscriptions, and a full-time person to watch all three dashboards.

Or you fly blind and find out rooms are broken when someone walks in.

Most organizations chose the second option.

The real cost

The Visibility Tax isn't just annoying. It has a measurable cost:

- Payroll waste. How many times has a 10-person meeting started late because the room wasn't working? Average IT salary in Australia is $95K. That's $760/hour for a room full of people standing around waiting for IT.

- IT reactive cycles. Your engineers are getting calls for things they could have prevented if they'd known about them at 6 AM instead of 10 AM.

- C-suite embarrassment. Every failed executive meeting is a procurement story waiting to happen. Procurement stories cost departments budget.

The Visibility Tax compounds these costs. You pay for the subscription *and* you still have the failures.

The fix

Spacera's Photon tier gives you a unified real-time dashboard across every Teams, Zoom, and Cisco room — for free. Unlimited rooms. Zero agents. Zero ongoing cost.

Not because we're feeling generous. Because visibility is a commodity. The real product is reliability — the ability to *act* on what you can see.

Give away the data. Sell the outcome.

That's our model. And it kills the Visibility Tax dead.

What happens next

Once you can see your rooms, you can start fixing them before they fail. That's what Mission Control is for — automated morning testing, Emily's L1/L2 resolution, and ITSM integration that means your ticketing system knows before your users do.

But step one is visibility. And step one should be free.

Start for free at apollo.spacera.io — no credit card, no limit on rooms, no visibility tax.