Charge for Creation, Not Access
TL;DR for the busy visitor:
- The prevailing quality-software pricing models bill every seat, whatever it does — reviewing a report is billable, checking whether a shipment cleared inspection is billable, and on some platforms your factories pay just to be on it.
- There's a simpler principle: the seat that creates the inspection data pays; accessing your own data is never a billable event.
- Applied: inspectors are $69/month. Managers, buyers, offices, agents, factories — everyone who reads, reviews, or books — free. Published, self-serve, no sales call.
*If that answers your question, the pricing table is at https://qualityiris.com/pricing. What follows is the argument for why it should work this way — everywhere, not just here.*
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The Problem With Seat Pricing
Every software pricing model is an argument about where the value is. Look at how the quality-management category prices itself, and the argument it makes is strange.
The prevailing models charge for every seat, regardless of what the seat does — the QA manager who reviews reports is billable, and the sourcing director who checks whether a shipment cleared inspection is billable too. Some models price each factory onboarded, so suppliers pay for the privilege of being inspected. Pricing pages, where they exist at all, end in "contact sales."
Follow that logic to its conclusion: reading a report that your own inspection fees already produced is a billable event. The paywall stands between a buyer and their own data.
The simpler rationale
Where Quality Data Begins
There is a cleaner argument available, and it starts from where the value is actually created: at the inspection.
The inspector on the floor — measuring, photographing, counting defects, signing the result — is the seat that creates the data. Everything downstream of that moment is consumption of what was already created: reviewing it, approving it, comparing this month to last, letting a buying office see its origin, letting HQ see every origin at once. None of that adds a unit of new quality data. It reads the data that the paid work already produced.
So the principle: **the seat that creates the data pays; accessing your own data is never a billable event.**
Notice what this principle does not depend on. It holds for an importer with three inspectors and fifteen reviewers, and it holds for an inspection agency with forty inspectors and three reviewers. It is not a discount dressed as a philosophy — the hands-heavy agency and the eyes-heavy importer both get the same deal, because the rationale is about where value originates, not about anyone's headcount ratio.
How I priced my own answer
Putting the Principle Into Practice
I built QualityIris around this principle, so the pricing table is short. Inspectors — the seats that perform inspections and generate reports — are $69 per month each. Everyone else is free: the managers who review and sign off, the buyers who read reports, the offices and agents who book, the factories being inspected. The price is published, the trial is self-serve, and no conversation with a sales team stands between you and the number.
That transparency is not generosity; it is the principle applied consistently. If access to your own data shouldn't cost money, then access to the price shouldn't cost a meeting.
Calculate Your Quality Costs
If you want to see what the model comes to at your volumes — inspectors, lots, fees — the AQL Reality Check calculator will do the arithmetic, free and without a sign-up. And the full pricing table, principle included, is at qualityiris.com/pricing.
The category has spent years arguing that watching quality data is worth charging for. I think the better argument is that creating it is — and that everything after belongs to you.
