The inspection software
industry has a playbook.
We're not running it.
Most software companies follow the same script: attract users with low prices, accumulate data, then raise prices once switching is painful. We published our source code to make that impossible.
8 minute readHow inspection software companies actually make money
If you've been inspecting for more than five years, you've probably felt this at least once.
A software company launches. Pricing is reasonable, maybe even cheap. The product is good. You move your whole business onto it — your templates, your client list, your workflow. Over a few years, it becomes the backbone of how you operate.
Then the price goes up. Or a feature you relied on gets moved to a higher tier. Or you find out the platform has been selling anonymized data to insurers, real estate platforms, or marketing companies. Or the company gets acquired and everything changes overnight.
This isn't a freak occurrence. It's a known business model. Build dependency, then monetize it.
Inspection software is particularly vulnerable to this because the data you generate — defect rates by neighborhood, property ages, common failure patterns, client demographics — is genuinely valuable to third parties. You created that data. You rarely benefit from it being sold.
Inspection software is a small market. That creates a specific kind of risk.
Home inspection is a niche. There are roughly 30,000–40,000 working inspectors in the US. That's not a small number of people, but it is a ceiling on how large any inspection software company can grow before revenue flatlines.
When a software company hits that ceiling, the pressure on owners and investors shifts. The options are predictable: sell the company to a larger platform, expand into adjacent markets like insurance referrals or repair coordination, or find new ways to monetize the data already collected. None of those options are primarily in inspectors' interests.
This isn't speculation. You can trace it in the acquisition history of the industry. Companies get built, reach scale, and then the business logic changes — because the incentive to keep improving software for a saturated market disappears.
We're not going to pretend the market ceiling doesn't exist. It does. InspectorHub will eventually reach a scale where growth slows. When that happens, the open-source license is what protects you — not our good intentions.
If InspectorHub is ever sold, the AGPL v3 license travels with the code. An acquirer cannot close the source, remove the self-hosting option, or retroactively restrict what you can do with the software. The community can fork the last open-source version and continue independently.
When the code is public, the rules are different
Publishing the source code under AGPL v3 isn't a marketing move. It's a structural constraint we've placed on ourselves.
Your data leaves with you. Full stop.
We use the phrase "no lock-in" deliberately. Here's what it means in concrete terms:
The hosted and self-hosted versions share the same inspection features. Here's exactly where they differ.
This is a fair question, and we'd rather answer it directly than hope you don't ask.
The codebase has two layers. Here's what each one is, who can read it, and what it does with your data:
| Layer | Repository | License | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
Inspection engine OpenInspection | Publicly on GitHub | AGPL v3 — public | Bookings, field forms, reports, photos, AI assist, e-signatures, payments, multi-tenancy, subdomain routing, billing tier enforcement. The same codebase runs both hosted and self-hosted. |
InspectorHub Portal Control plane | Separate repo | Proprietary | Subscriptions, billing, team invites, account management only. Does not have access to your inspection records. |
The hosted and self-hosted versions run from the same open-source codebase. There is no private "SaaS branch" — the code you can read on GitHub is the code we deploy. Multi-tenancy and billing tier enforcement are part of the open-source engine, not a hidden layer.
In practical terms: everything that touches your inspection data is readable. The proprietary portal only knows your email address, subscription status, and team members.
"So the hosted version runs exactly the same code as the self-hosted version?"
Yes. The inspection engine is a single codebase. The hosted service deploys it in multi-tenant mode (serving thousands of businesses on shared infrastructure); a self-hosted deployment runs it in single-tenant mode. The mode is a configuration difference, not a code difference. A self-hosted inspector gets every feature a hosted inspector has — the code is identical.
For maximum isolation — Silo Mode
Enterprise customers can request Silo Mode, where OpenInspection runs in a completely separate Cloudflare account under their own control. In this configuration, even InspectorHub's infrastructure cannot access your inspection data. Contact us to learn more →
If you write code, we'd love your help.
OpenInspection is built on a stack that modern developers will recognize: Cloudflare Workers, Hono, Drizzle ORM, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS. The architecture is documented, the tests are real, and the contribution process is standard GitHub flow.
We're especially interested in contributions that benefit working inspectors: better field form UX, new report formats, integrations with scheduling tools, improved offline behavior, localization.
The inspection industry is large and underserved by good software. If you've ever thought about building tools for a niche with real users and real problems, this is a good place to start.
What we're committing to, in plain language
We're asking you to trust us with your business. The least we can do is make that trust verifiable.
NO CARD NEEDED.
ON GITHUB.