Read the small print before you sign three years of it

The demo is free. The exit is not, and hardly anyone checks the price of leaving before signing up to stay. Field service contracts routinely run for years, and the terms deciding what happens when you want out sit in the part of the document nobody reads on a sales call. By the time they bite, you've moved your data in, trained your team and lost every scrap of the bargaining power you had as a prospect.

So read the exit before you sign the entrance. Reviews of the bigger platforms are full of people who didn't, and the pattern is consistent enough to plan around: long minimum terms, exit clauses that want the rest of the contract in full, and prices that climb as you grow. None of it is hidden. It's just in the small print, which is where the money always is.

The terms people wish they'd read

Take what follows as reported reviewer experience rather than settled fact, because that's what it is. The pattern still repeats too often to wave away. Reviewers of one large UK platform describe five-year minimum terms and early exit that demands the full remaining value of the contract. One reviewer reports being taken to court and handed a county court judgment for £50,000 plus fees. That same platform holds 2.1 on Trustpilot against 4.5 on Capterra. The review-site score is the courtship. The Trustpilot score is the marriage.

And it isn't a single vendor. Reviewers of another platform describe an account switched off while the balance of a three-year contract was pursued. Whether or not any one account matches your own reading of events, the shape holds: the term is long, and leaving early is costly by design.

The bill grows even if you don't renegotiate

The advertised price is an opening position, not the number you'll pay. Two things move it.

The first is add-ons. The entry tier is usually missing the one feature that removes your real admin burden, so the price you'll actually pay is a tier or two above the one on the pricing page. One reviewer's verdict on a big platform: "You will be charged for everything and there are extras on every turn you take". Even data usage can bite. The same estate manager noted that "a 500mb data allowance per tablet per month is virtually impossible to stay within on a platform that encourages plenty of photo taking", and photographs are not optional in compliance work.

The second is seats. Per-seat pricing looks fair at the headcount you sign at and painful at the headcount you grow into. A US analysis runs it: ten users at $50 a seat is $6,000 a year; the same firm at fifty users pays $30,000, a 400% jump for identical software. The figures are American, but the mechanism travels. Add people and you're billed more for software that hasn't changed a line.

The workaround that quietly breaks compliance

When seats get dear, firms do the obvious thing and share logins. Three engineers on one account, and the seat count stops rising. It also wrecks the audit trail, and for a water hygiene contractor that's not an incidental cost, it defeats the point of the system. A compliance record exists to say who did what, and when. Put four people behind one login and every reading is signed by the same ghost. You bought the software to prove attendance and accountability, then priced yourself into erasing both.

What leaving actually costs

The other figure nobody runs is the cost of switching away. Analyses put the effective exit at 150 to 200% of your annual contract value once you count migration, retraining and lost productivity. The reason it runs that high is the data. Years of records sit in the vendor's own format, and when they come out the histories often arrive attached to the wrong sites, so someone spends weeks reattaching them by hand. Moving records cleanly from one system to another is never the quick job the sales deck implies. The courtship never mentions any of this, because you only feel it on the way out, by which point the courting has stopped.

Put rough numbers on it. On a £12,000-a-year contract, that 150-to-200% range works out at £18,000 to £24,000 to leave, spent on migration, retraining and the productivity you lose while half the team learns a new system and the other half fixes records that came across attached to the wrong sites. That sits on top of anything the old contract still demands. The lock-in is more than the exit clause. It's the plain difficulty of getting years of history out cleanly, which is why firms stay somewhere they've stopped liking long after they meant to move. That's the whole design: the term holds you for a while, and the data holds you after that.

The buying checklist

Ask these before you sign, and get the answers in writing:

• What's the minimum term, and what exactly ends it? "Twelve months rolling" and "five years, exit at full remaining value" are different products at the same monthly price.
• Which tier do I actually need? Price the version that carries the feature removing your admin, not the headline one.
• What's the seat price at twice my current headcount? Do the sum for the firm you're planning to become.
• What counts as an add-on? Get the full list of everything billed on top, data and usage included.
• How does my data leave? Export format, cost, notice period. If nobody will put the exit in writing, that reluctance is your answer.

None of these are hostile questions, and a vendor confident in the product answers them flat. The contract is one of three things a demo won't show you. The other two, whether your engineers will actually use the app and whether the data model fits compliance work, are just as easy to miss while you're being courted and just as dear to discover afterwards.

For our part, we went the other way on all of it. BlueWave is seat-based and monthly rolling, with the price on the page and no lock-in. That isn't generosity. It's the deal we'd want offered to us, and a contract that has to earn the next month keeps us more honest than a five-year one ever would.

The demo will always look good; that's its job. Spend ten minutes on the exit clause instead, because that's the part you'll live with. If the salesperson is glad to talk about leaving, that tells you something. If the room goes quiet the moment you raise it, that tells you more.