Why we open-sourced our software

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 read

The problem

How 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.

Market risk

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.

Acquisition

A new owner inherits your data and your workflow dependency. Their priorities may have nothing to do with inspection software. Integration into a larger real estate or insurance platform may follow.

Business model expansion

To grow beyond the market ceiling, the platform starts selling referral relationships, lead generation, or data to insurers and repair companies. Your inspection findings become a product. You don’t see the revenue from that.

Development stagnation

When the market is saturated and revenue stops growing, software investment slows. Updates become less frequent. Bugs persist. The product you built your workflow on gradually stops improving.

We’re not going to pretend the market ceiling doesn’t exist. It does. Inspector Hub will eventually reach a scale where growth slows. When that happens, the open-source license is what protects you — not our good intentions.

If Inspector Hub 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.

Why open source

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.

We cannot hide what we do with your data

Every line of code that touches your inspection data is publicly readable on GitHub. There are no hidden analytics calls, no background data exports, no “telemetry” that sends your client information to a third party. You can verify this yourself — or ask a developer friend to check.

We cannot raise prices to a point where self-hosting isn’t worth it

If we ever raised the hosted price to a level that made it cheaper to run your own server, you’d have every legal right to take the open-source code and do exactly that. We’ve essentially capped our own pricing power. The market rate for self-hosting (~$0/month on Cloudflare’s free tier) is a ceiling on how expensive we can become.

The community can fix what we miss

Traditional software companies decide what gets built and when. Open source means other developers — including inspectors who write code, or independent developers who work with inspection companies — can submit improvements, fix bugs, and build integrations. The software improves faster than any single company could manage.

No lock-in

Your data leaves with you. Full stop.

We use the phrase “no lock-in” deliberately. Here’s what it means in concrete terms:

Export anytime

Every inspection record, template, client, and report can be exported from the dashboard in standard formats at any time, including the day you cancel.

Switch to self-hosted

If you want to stop paying for the hosted version, you can take the same open-source code, deploy it to your own Cloudflare account, and import your exported data. Your workflow continues without interruption.

Choose your version

Because the software is on GitHub with full version history, you can deploy any previous version if an update introduces something you don’t like. You’re not forced onto the latest release.

Fork it

If we ever went out of business, changed direction, or made decisions you disagreed with, you or anyone else could fork the project and continue developing it independently. The code doesn’t disappear with the company.

What’s open

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 software 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.
Inspector Hub 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 software, 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 software 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.

How to verify what’s actually running

We publish the exact commit hash of the deployed version in our public changelog. The repository is publicly readable on GitHub — a developer can compare the running commit against the repo at any time. If you find a discrepancy, file a GitHub issue — we’ll respond publicly.

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 Inspector Hub’s infrastructure cannot access your inspection data. Contact us to learn more

For Developers

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.

Cloudflare WorkersHono v4Drizzle ORMTypeScriptD1 · SQLiteR2Tailwind CSSVitestPlaywright

View the Repository Read the Contributing Guide Browse Open Issues

Our commitment

What we’re committing to, in plain language

All inspection features will remain open source under AGPL v3

Bookings, forms, reports, AI assist, e-signatures, payments, multi-tenancy — the entire inspection engine is in a single public repository and will not be moved to a closed-source license. AGPL v3 legally requires that any code used to provide a network service have its source published. We cannot run secret infrastructure code on top of an AGPL v3 codebase.

There is no private SaaS version of the engine

Hosted and self-hosted users run the same codebase. Every feature available on the hosted service is available to self-hosted deployments. There is no “hosted-only” branch or proprietary fork.

We will not sell your inspection data to third parties

Not to insurers, not to real estate platforms, not to marketing companies. The codebase is fully auditable on GitHub — anyone can verify there is no data exfiltration code.

The hosted service will always offer a self-hosted alternative

We will not remove the ability to run your own instance. The self-hosted path will remain documented and supported.

Pricing will be per-seat, with no feature paywalls

If that ever needs to change, we’ll announce it in advance and honor existing plans. The current pricing page is not aspirational — it’s binding in the ways we can make it binding.

You can export all your data, anytime

We will never restrict exports, even for churning customers. Your inspection history, templates, client records, and reports belong to you.

We’re asking you to trust us with your business. The least we can do is make that trust verifiable.

For Inspectors

TRY IT FREE.
NO CARD NEEDED.

Try the hosted version free for 30 days. If it’s not right for you, we’ll refund your first month — no questions asked.

Start Free Trial

For Developers

THE CODE IS
ON GITHUB.

Contributions welcome. Real users, real problems, documented architecture, standard GitHub flow.

View OpenInspection

The inspection softwareindustry has a playbook.We’re not running it.