What it costs
Three parties, three different answers, and they are set out separately below. The short version: your fire district is never billed for anything; the contractor who files pays a per-report fee well under what they pay now; and on top of that you set a surcharge that you keep.
There is no license, no per-seat charge, no per-building charge, no implementation fee and no minimum. There is no budget line to defend and nothing to renew, because the district is not our customer in the money sense at all.
It is $5 when they file through the wizard on the site; if they want to use our PDF conversion engine, or upload a PDF the district will have to review, we charge $55.
The filing fee is the entire business, and it works at this price because the overhead behind it is small. A filing costs us storage and a little compute. There are no offices, no support tier and no per-district project to recover — so we are profitable on volume rather than on any one district.
This is all of it. There is no second page, no professional services line, and no figure that appears after a signature.
| What | Price | Paid by | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| A structured filing entered via the site wizard | $5 | the contractor | The form for that system type, filled in and validated as it is typed. |
| An uploaded PDF a district person has to review | $55 | the contractor | The contractor’s own report, sealed and filed as-is, waiting for a person at your office to read it. Nothing can text-extract a scan, so its findings need a human review. |
| A PDF read into the form | $55 | the contractor | We transcribe their existing report into the structured form. They have to review the final product and then accept and sign off. It then becomes a normal structured inspection report in our system. |
| A correction | $0 | nobody | Corrections are free, always. A product that charged for fixing a record would be a product that gets fewer records fixed. |
| Your surcharge | you set it | the contractor pays it, your district receives it | Added on top of our fee, frozen onto each filing so a later rate change cannot rewrite history, and totaled for you monthly. Setting it to zero is also an option. |
It is not a penalty and it is not a mandate. A scan is never text-extracted, so nothing in it can be counted, searched or aged, and a district person needs to review the PDF. Pricing is currently the only lever that moves contractors toward the format that works without your district having to compel anything.
And these are our defaults, not a fixed schedule. If a different arrangement suits your district better, whether a different gap between the two or a different treatment of uploads while your contractors adjust, tell us and we will work it out with you.
our filing fee your district’s surcharge what a contractor pays today
| Filed | Our fee | District surcharge | Contractor pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today, typically | — | $0 | $37–$75 |
| Compliance Shepherd, structured form | $5 | $0 | $5 |
| Compliance Shepherd, with a $10 surcharge | $5 | $10 | $15 |
Even with a $10 surcharge going to your district, a contractor files for a fifth of what they pay now. That is the whole argument in one line: the saving is large enough that your department can take a share of it and the contractor is still far better off.
400 structured filings in a month, with a $10 district surcharge. Illustrative figures — your volume and your rate are both yours.
| Your district pays | $0 |
|---|---|
| Your district receives | $4,000 |
| We receive | $2,000 |
| Your contractors pay, in total | $6,000 |
| What the same 400 reports cost them todayat the bottom of the $37–$75 range | $14,800 |
| Cost of compliance removed from your district | −$8,800 |
That last figure is a reduction, not a charge — $8,800 that nobody spends. It does not appear in your budget because it was never in your budget: it sits in the bids you accept and the maintenance contracts your building owners sign.
And the reason it matters beyond the money is timing. When filing is expensive, a building owner treats it as a bill to defer. They wait for the notice, and then wait out the grace period, before they spend anything. At $5 there is far less to defer, so the report gets filed when the inspection happens rather than when the deadline forces it. A district that hears about a dead panel in March instead of September has a safer building for six months, and one less letter to send.
You are being asked to name a private company as the only route through which a legally required report may be filed.
$5 a structured filing, $55 a PDF, billed monthly to the contractor. There is no other line of income today. We become profitable by having more districts, not by extracting more from any one of them — which is the same reason the price is not an introductory rate: it is set at a level that already works at our cost base.
A building owner who has claimed their building and is looking at their own open deficiencies may want quotes to fix them. Offering that — owner-initiated, never cold, with the contractor who filed the report given first refusal — is a service we may charge contractors to appear in. It is not built.
A fair question that nobody asks until it matters. The records are your district’s: the whole register exports to CSV from a button on your own screen, today, and every sealed report is a PDF we can hand over in bulk.
The guided demo is the real software running against a fire district we invented for it. Set a surcharge, watch what it does to an invoice, and read a sealed report. No login, nothing installed, nothing saved.
