iPassport is another eQMS software available on the market. Its focus seems to mainly center around the UK market.

iPassport's pricing is also.. weird. The good thing is that it's transparent, although you do have to do significant digging to find out about it. There are two datapoints here:

The TLDR here is that typical pricing starts at around €8000 / year. However, the pricing model becomes complex and confusing quickly because iPassport introduces this definition of "concurrent users". So the idea here is that your price scales up (fast!) if you e.g. require more than 5 concurrent users. If you plan on building a fast-growing company, then you'll likely hit this limit soon.

Hidden costs
iPassport also introduces a few concepts in its pricing which are hard to understand. Among other things, there's a setup cost of ~1k GBP which is probably non-optional (thank you very much), and a training which they call "train the trainer" (???) which costs ~1.3k GBP. Not sure whether that's optional, but my guess is that it's not.

Data export costs extra!
A big yellow flag here is that exporting data seems to cost you extra. iPassport calls this the "iPassport Export Service", and it costs ~1.5k GBP per year. This is quite confusing because, in our experience, data exports are usually one-off things, e.g. when migrating eQMS software. So why charge this as a recurring annual subscription? Weird. Then again, everything here is weird, starting with the G-Cloud.

Roughly speaking, iPassport seems to cover most "normal" eQMS features like document control, versioning, training and CAPAs.

It's unclear whether iPassport covers requirements management which you need for the technical documentation of your medical device.

Based on the supported file formats for documents (HTML & PDF), it doesn't sound like it offers a text editor. So if you had this wild idea of actually editing text within your eQMS software, iPassport does not have you covered. But this seems to be common in this very opaque industry of mediocre enterprise software, where e.g. Greenlight Guru, a larger player in the industry, also doesn't offer a text editor.

Good luck typing out documents in Microsoft Word on your computer (ugh) and uploading them manually.. into the G-Cloud. Just kidding.. you data is probably stored somewhere on iPassport's infrastructure.

To us, iPassport seems just like yet another mostly-mediocre enterprise software with a clunky user interface, limited functionality for medical devices (no requirements management) and, get this, no text editor.

The pricing is somewhat less ridiculous than other providers, but still expensive. It has significant hidden costs, and the pricing scales up quickly once your company grows.

There has to be a better alternative.

Oh wait, there is: Ours. Choose Formwork. It's our eQMS, built by a bunch of enthusiastic dudes who are just in this to help fast-moving, founder-led companies enter the medical device market. Pricing tiers are free, 99€ / month or 499€ / month. You get unlimited users, requirements management for medical devices, and you're in good company because countless companies have passed EU MDR, FDA and Health Canada audits with Formwork. We even have a text editor. We're not on the G-Cloud though. Check it out.