Here is a claim worth sitting with. If you do not think there is at least $1,000 of excess material and labor wasted on every access controlled opening, you are not paying attention. That number sounds high until you start tracing where the money actually goes.
The waste is rarely a single line item anyone can point to. It is spread across the entire project, buried in coordination, delays, rework, and padded bids, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed and unaddressed on job after job. Add it up and $1,000 per opening is a conservative estimate.
Where the Waste Starts: Design and Decisions
The cost begins long before anyone is on site. Coordinating an access controlled opening during design requires the architect, the electrical engineer, and the hardware consultant to align on devices, locations, and wiring, and that coordination is time consuming and frequently incomplete. Details fall through the cracks between three parties who each assume someone else has it covered.
It gets worse when owners defer their security decisions until late in the project, or require security work to be performed by their own separate contractors. Both are common, and both introduce surprises and conflicts at exactly the point in the schedule when surprises are most expensive to resolve. Every gap left open in the design phase becomes a cost that surfaces later.
Where It Compounds: Fabrication and Delivery
Once fabrication begins, the coordination between the hollow metal frame and the door hardware during shop drawing preparation is detailed and error prone. Those shop drawings then go through multiple review iterations, and each round of revisions pushes frame delivery further out.
When frames arrive late, masonry has often already moved forward, which forces afterset frame installation. At that point, exposed conduit frequently becomes the only available option for the wire pathway. On a brand new building, that is a compromise nobody is happy with, and it is a direct result of delays that started upstream.
Where It Gets Expensive: Installation and Wiring
Installation is where the waste becomes tangible. Without a continuous pathway, each device on the frame gets its own home run drop from the ceiling, often three to four per opening, run individually. That is redundant labor and material on every single frame. When pathways are missed by the contractor, never designed in the first place, or poorly installed, the gaps left behind create even more field labor to work around.
Those flawed pathways also inflate bids. IT and low voltage contractors know that unreliable pathways mean unforeseen problems, so they pad their pricing to protect themselves. The owner pays for that risk premium on every opening whether the problems materialize or not. And because most of these installations lack any flexible design, any late change becomes highly expensive and delays completion further.
Where It Ends: Inspection, Rework, and the Fix
The final round of waste shows up at the end. Performance problems discovered during late stage inspections trigger investigation, wire corrections, and repairs, often because the wiring was never protected in the first place. Fixing it means intruding into completed work and then repairing the finishes that intrusion damages. This is the most expensive waste of all, because it undoes work that was already paid for once.
How Frame Frog Removes Entire Categories of This Waste
Most cost cutting efforts chip away at one line item. Frame Frog eliminates whole categories of this waste at once. It provides a single protected wiring pathway built into the frame and coordinated in the hardware set, which changes the math across the entire project.
Instead of three or four individual home run drops per opening, there is one connected pathway serving every device. Instead of exposed conduit on an afterset frame, the pathway is already inside the frame where it belongs. Instead of unprotected wire that fails inspection, the wiring is protected for the life of the building. And because the pathway is continuous and fishable, late changes and future upgrades can be handled without tearing into finished work. Frame Frog Kits package everything an opening needs into a single unit, which also simplifies the coordination and procurement that drive so much of the early waste.
The $1,000 per opening is not a fixed cost of doing business. It is the price of a broken process, and most of it is avoidable. For owners and developers who want to understand where their money is actually going, our website has links For Property Owners and For Developers pages cover the impact directly, and the How to Specify Frame Frog guide shows how to build the savings in from the start.
Contact the Frame Frog team or request a demo to see how much a cleaner approach can save on your next project.