Five-Year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Five-year total cost of ownership is the full modeled cost of a phone-free program over five years — including hardware, annual replacements, and staff labor — used to compare phone pouches against software on equal footing.
Also called 5-year TCO, total cost of ownership
A vendor's sticker price rarely reflects the real cost of a phone-free program. Five-year TCO adds the recurring costs a quote omits: consumable pouch replacements, unlocking hardware, and the daily staff time spent distributing and collecting devices.
Comparing programs on five-year TCO rather than upfront price is the standard way administrators evaluate pouches versus software, because the recurring costs dominate over a multi-year horizon.
Related terms
Phone Pouch
A phone pouch is a lockable fabric pouch that holds a student's phone during the school day and is opened with a magnetic unlocking base, used to physically prevent phone access on a phone-free campus.
OS-Level Phone Locking
OS-level phone locking restricts a phone's apps and functions at the operating-system layer of the device itself, rather than inside a single app the student controls.