One common question is when you should upgrade your Formwork subscription, and whether you lose data if you change your mind and downgrade. Let’s take a look!
Formwork has three pricing tiers. Here’s a quick summary of the Formwork page:
- Formwork Community Edition (free): Contains the QMS features, but not the Techdoc features. This means you can do your company-wide compliance documentation in it (QMS), but not your product-specific documentation (Techdoc) which you have to hand in to your auditors for product approval.
- Formwork Starter (49€): All Formwork features. Only available for startups which fulfil certain criteria, currently <= 3 employees, no funding, no revenue.
- Formwork QMS + Techdoc (499€): All Formwork features, available for everyone. You pay 499€ / month if we can show your logo on our website, otherwise 799€ / month.
So the TLDR here is that, feature-wise, only the free Formwork Community Edition differs from the others. It has less features. Formwork Starter (49€) and Formwork QMS + Techdoc (499€) both have the complete set of features.
Cool! So the first obvious question is: How far do you get with the free Community Edition, and when would it make sense to upgrade (if at all)? To explain that, let me briefly tell you the fascinating (just kidding) story QMS stuff and technical documentation.
To be compliant with medical device regulations, in simplified terms, you have to do two things: Company-wide documentation and product-specific documentation. Here are some examples:
- Company-wide documentation (QMS): You have to document how you store documents and records at your company, how you train your employees, etc. You do this by filling out “SOP” documents like the ones I linked to.
- Product-specific documentation (technical documentation): You have to document which features your software has, how you plan to test it, etc.
Okay, cool! Now, how will auditors check those things? Here’s how:
- QMS: They will come in to your office for 2-3 days, read your SOPs and check whether you actually adhere to them. If this sounds very weird, yes, it is very weird – it’s literally auditors reading your SOPs in front of you, with a lot of awkward silence.
- Technical Documentation: This is not done in your office. Instead, you send them (usually) PDF exports of your product documentation via email, and they review it asynchronously.
Okay, so now we nearly got sidetracked. Where does Formwork now come into the picture? Simple:
- Formwork Community Edition covers the QMS part, but you don’t get access to the technical documentation features. In other words, you can start doing your company-wide QMS documentation and you could even try to get that audited by auditors, but you won’t be able to do your product based documentation, much less hand that in later.
- Formwork Start and Formwork QMS + Techdoc have all features.
If all of this was still too abstract, let’s make it concrete and look at how a typical startup might handle this.
Typical Startup Timeline
In the beginning, you’re three dudes or dudesses, sitting in a garage, living off your savings, writing code which shall become a medical device. So far, so good!
You sign up for the free Community Edition and start filling out SOPs so that you already make good progress on your QMS documentation (I should have mentioned that all our templates are free and integrated in Formwork, which is very awesome).
Cool! Now, one of two things happens which would trigger a change:
- Your product is done: Because you’re 10x developers, you’ve finished development of your product. You still don’t have any funding, but you now want to document it and hand it in to auditors.
In this case, upgrade to Formwork Starter for 49€ / month. You are exactly the people we want to support! Now, get your product documentation done in Formwork and hand it in. Good luck! - Or: You’ve raised funding and are growing: Your product might not be done yet, but you’re making good progress. In the meantime, you’ve gotten some investment and your team is growing. You want to start documenting your product while development is still underway.
In that case, upgrade to Formwork QMS + Techdoc for 499€ / month. This will enable you to start documenting your product, and you’ll be able to hand everything in once your development is done.
So that’s that. Any other questions? Ah yes, one more: People ask about up- and downgrading and cancellations.
Up- and Downgrading, Cancellations
First off, cancellations are supremely easy in Formwork: Just hit the “Cancel” button in the billing section. No need to send us an email, no need to schedule a call. In contrast to our competitors, we’re not evil. Just cancel. Your subscription will end in one month or less, depending on your last billing date. The minimum commitment is only one month anyway. You can export your data at any time, too!
How to upgrade? Simply navigate to Settings (top right corner) –> Billing, select the package you’d like to upgrade to, and purchase.
How to downgrade? Usually, people downgrade to the free version. In that case, just cancel your subscription as described above.
Will you lose data? Our guiding theme is “don’t be evil” (similar to a search engine company two decades ago.. hm.. what was its name). So, no, you don’t lose any data! If you’ve started creating your technical documentation already, you will (obviously) lose access to those features when you downgrade. So you won’t be able to access your technical documentation any more. But the data still persists there, so if you upgrade again in the future, you can continue where you left off.
You can, of course, also export all your data before you downgrade. So, regardless how you spin it, you don’t lose any data. I think that’s pretty cool.
How Long Do You Need Formwork?
Another common question: Could you just purchase Formwork for a while, document your medical device, hand it in, get it certified, then downgrade to the Community Edition?
This won’t work, unfortunately. Think of Formwork like a Google Drive: It’s where you store your compliance documentation. Your auditors and/or the state authorities might audit you at any time, and then it might be rather awkward if you e.g. don’t have access to the Formwork product features and can’t view your product documentation (chuckle).
So.. no, unfortunately this won’t work.
Unsure Whether To Upgrade?
Here’s an interesting thought experiment: As Formwork only has a minimum commitment of one month, you could simply upgrade, try it out, and if you don’t like it, cancel your subscription and go to one of our competitors. There’s not much to lose.
The opposite is not true: If you go to our competitors first, they’ll lock you in with a two- or three-year contract, and if you don’t like their software, you’re screwed.
Better try out Formwork first.
Any other questions? Write them in the comments below 🙂
