Spectora licenses software per-user, meaning that every individual that is using the platform requires their own subscription. This includes sub-inspectors, employees, trainees, apprentices, assistants, helpers - anyone that is doing inspections. (Office/support staff are free but do not have access to the mobile app.) Don't worry, you can hide trainees and unlicensed inspectors from client-facing pages and your Online Scheduler - here's how.
We understand that it may be tempting to double-up and share logins between multiple individuals. Here's a few reasons why you shouldn't:
It's a security risk. Sometimes certain employees don't work out. Firing an employee without the ability to lock them out of software is a risk to your data and your business. Also, setting privileges per-inspector is a vital part of business security and something you can't do by sharing logins between employees.
It's a business risk since the paper trail gets confusing. We log changes to important data in our database based on the user that did them. In case there is a legal issue down the road, we can look back and identify which user did what. If you're sharing logins you lose that capacity and potentially compromise your ability to win a costly court case.
You'll encounter more bugs. We write code with the assumption that you're complying with the Terms of Use. Certain functionality of our website operates on a per-user level. If multiple individuals are sharing a user login, you may encounter bugs that wouldn't happen if you were using the software as intended. Also, it's harder to prioritize looking into your issues when we know you're intentional short-changing us.
Paying for subscriptions supports Spectora's ability to grow, ability to offer support and ability to build new features. We're a small business that is funded by your subscriptions. We aren't owned by insurance companies or contractor networks and we don't sell your data. What you pay us is what keeps servers running and employees paid.
We have costs, including support costs, data costs, server traffic costs, per-app-install software costs, and much more. When you don't pay for subscriptions we're still have to pay our bills for your increased usage.
It's stealing, plain and simple. We work hard to provide a quality product, just like you work hard to offer a great service. Would you accept a client telling you "I didn't like your pricing model so I'm paying you half your price, k?"
It doesn't matter if an apprentice/trainee isn't making you enough money yet - you're still using the service. Would you accept a client telling you "I'm not going to make much money on this flip, so I'll just pay you a little less on this one okay? But please do just as good a job?" As a software company, we pay our new support staff for weeks before they are useful, all the while paying for additional licenses for all our chat software, screensharing software, email, password manager, issue tracker, etc. Training someone is part of the cost of doing business.
We know that some of you reading this were not aware of our policy and will be signing up your additional employees - thank you and our apologies for not making this more obvious!
For those of you that continue to abuse the system, please be aware that we will be forced to take action, either by discontinuing your account or adding measures in our software to enforce proper usage. Please do the right thing and not force our hand - it will maintain your reputation as a professional and keep our business relationship positive.
Thank you for your understanding.