Quite a few of our consulting customers are looking for eQMS software and ask us whether we know the Greenlight Guru price. Generally speaking, this information is very hard to come by as their website doesn’t explicitly list any prices.
This is very unfortunate, because hinders transparency and makes it very difficult for medical device companies to actually compare offers – they have to schedule a sales call with each eQMS vendor like Greenlight Guru to subsequently receive a custom quote. And even then it’s hard to compare those offers as eQMS have different packages and different add-on fees e.g. for additional users.
Suffice to say, it’s a very intransparent and shady market!
Here’s what we’ve heard so far from our customers about Greenlight Guru prices. First, a huge and obvious disclaimer: These are things we heard from customers, so don’t regard this as any sort of official information from Greenlight Guru – if you want an “official” quote, you’d have to reach out to them. But hopefully our data might give you a rough indication of whether it might suit your budget.
Greenlight Guru Pricing
Most of our customers are small startups, i.e. 5-10 people. Those who have told us about Greenlight Guru prices typically mention prices in the range of $25k – $35k per year. Yes, that’s right, we’re talking a mid-five-digit sum. Per year! And that price only includes a few user seats for the software, typically something like 3-5 “complete” seats which can create and edit documents etc., and another 3-5, um, “non-complete” seats which mostly can only view documents.
If you think that’s crazy, that wasn’t even it yet!
It’s quite likely that this price already includes some sort of “startup” discount. Because their actual price goes up significantly once your company grows and you want to add more seats to your account. We’ve talked to one company who actually decided to stop using Greenlight Guru because the increased price wouldn’t have been feasible for their growing startup.
Greenlight Guru Minimum Commitment / Contract Duration
The typical minimum contract durations we’ve heard from Greenlight Guru are 2-3 years. Yep. And guess what, you have to make this decision without ever getting a trial account as they only show you a demo in a sales call.
So, let me spell this out for you again: Are you willing to commit ~$60k in total to a software which you haven’t tried out yourself, only based on a shiny sales demo with a salesperson who doesn’t even know much about medical device compliance?
Well.. good luck.
Personally, I think that any software as a service (SaaS) should have a monthly cancellation option, because in the fast-moving world of startups, who knows whether you need a software in 3, 6 or 12 months!
The final point I’d like to talk about is lock-in.
Greenlight Guru Lock-In
One huge drawback of most eQMS software vendors, including Greenlight Guru, is that they don’t allow you to export all your data in a structured, machine-readable way. That means that it’ll be very hard for you to switch eQMS software providers if you ever want to.
This is crazy! So if you choose Greenlight Guru and end up unhappy with its price (or anything else), you’re likely stuck with that wrong decision forever.
Conclusion: Purchasing Greenlight Guru
To sum up, purchase Greenlight Guru if:
- You’re willing to spend ~30k$ per year on a software
- You’re willing to make that decision based only on a sales call without a trial of the software
- You’re willing to get locked in and see prices go up significantly when your company grows.
As you might have noticed, it’s a shady industry.
At OpenRegulatory, we set out to change that. We’re creating more transparency in the medical device compliance field, even if it’s not in our own best interest: We’re sharing all our medical device compliance templates for free and we’ve created a QMS software overview to help companies choose the right software.
And, yep, we saw how shady the eQMS software market is which made us develop an eQMS software of our own in which we’d do everything in a better way: Our eQMS software, Formwork, has transparent pricing, monthly billing and unlimited users (!). It starts as low as 49€ / month for early-stage startups, which is (checks notes) 47 times cheaper than Greenlight Guru or only ~2% of its price. Yep. I guess you should check it out unless you’re willing to overspend 47x (!) on your eQMS software.
If you’re interested further, check out this video in which I show you the shady marketing practices of eQMS software vendors.
