Like most of you, we're a small self-funded business. Kevin and I started this company in our basements. We don't have big money investors like insurance companies or contractor networks paying our bills. Like all of you, we want our business to be profitable, sustainable, and continue to grow to serve the needs of all of our customers better and better.
Like many of you that started with one service, like a Residential Home Inspection, and later added on other services to meet additional needs your customers requested, like Radon Inspection or Mold Inspection, we also want to continue expanding to meet the needs and requests of our various customers.
Additional services often have additional costs. For you, it might be additional education, equipment, and time. For us, it is development, maintenance, QA, support, documentation, and servers. Not to mention a myriad of expensive software services for sending emails, sending and receiving text messages, simulating hundreds of mobile devices, managing product development, managing code, getting maps, getting driving directions, processing images, storing images, tracking errors, monitoring uptime, facilitating our online chat, and many more. The costs for software development are huge and probably difficult to see from the outside.
It's definitely a tough question for us business-wise... How do we cover costs and maintain profitability? How do we ensure each segment of our users are getting what they want at a price they feel is good value? Do we keep raising prices across-the-board for new customers to cover all this, potentially excluding new inspectors just starting out that can't justify the higher price point? Do we break our product into tiers, like most SaaS businesses do eventually? If so, which features get included where? What will existing customers think? What about the customers that are exceptions to our arbitrary buckets? There aren't any "right" answers.
We will always stand by our grandfathered pricing for the software you all are paying for now. We're not going to remove any features currently in the software and we will continue to add features to improve our core product. We always want our core offering to meet the needs of most inspectors to run their business. Of course, for those of you with growing businesses and growing needs, we want to offer you solutions to your problems too! We just need to do it in a way that is sustainable from a business perspective or else you won't be able to enjoy it for long.
The business decisions that went into Spectora Advanced resulted from surveys, phone calls, emails, and collaborative discussion with as many of you as possible. We appreciate the input of everyone, from the new solo inspectors to some of the largest inspection companies in the country. We hope you get great value from this set of tools!