As the property development and app development field gets more competitive, developers are becoming more sophisticated in their funding efforts. If you don’t keep up, you might end up paying additional amounts for an app or software long after the initial purchase. Below we look at a few of these fringe areas and nooks where your money might get swallowed up.

• Subscription

If there is but one word that should set off the alarm bells in your mind as a property inspection app or software user then it is ‘subscription’. What happens here is that the app or software developer offers his or her product at a seemingly low initial price in comparison to products in the same category. He or she then throws in a small subscription fee payable monthly or annually which is conveniently charged to your credit card or PayPal, making it very easy to forget that you are paying.

The other red light regarding subscription is the period for which you subscribe. If you absolutely have to take out a subscription, ensure that you are not tied down to a long subscription period. This means that you should, for example, choose to pay a monthly fee rather than be tied down to an obligatory annual service. This makes it easy to cancel when you feel that you are not getting value for your money.

As a property inspection software owner, it is best you pay a relatively higher price upfront than have a subscription that slowly takes out money from your pockets.

• Update fees

There are software providers who always come up with these tiny updates which you then have to pay to enjoy. The ideal situation is that software updates are freely downloadable online if you have a purchased a valid software and can prove ownership by providing the license code or number for the product. Unless an update is a game changer-a tweak that hugely positively changes your business-do not pay for it.

• Training fees

The other hidden cash cow for property inspection and app developers is training fees. This is especially specific to software that is quite bulky and hard to use. Instead of having to go through a slow and steep learning curve, the developer offers to come train you how to get the best out of the software for a fee. We always maintain that property inspection software and apps should be easy to use, otherwise they are fundamentally flawed. That said, if software is to be used by many inspectors in a property inspection company, it might be cheaper to pay a one-time training fee to the developer than have your employees use company time-which eats into the man hours and adversely affects productivity-to learn how to use software. Big developers will hold workshops where they train people en masse and issue certification afterwards. These instances are quite rare, unfortunately.

These are a few of the things that you should look out for when procuring software and apps.