How PreShiftIQ™ Is Paid

Any buyer being helped to choose software should know who is paying for the help. Here is our answer, in full, including the number.

Buyers pay nothing: no engagement fee, no retainer, no hourly rate, no subscription. Vendors pay one published rate: 5 percent of first-year contract value, due only when a matched buyer becomes that vendor's customer. There is no lead fee, nothing is owed before a buyer engages, and the terms are the same for every vendor in every category.

Buyers pay nothing.

There is no engagement fee, no retainer, no hourly rate, no subscription. Buyers across the supply chain ecosystem use the assessment and receive their matches at no cost, and no invoice follows. We are not a consultancy and we do not sell hours.

Vendors pay one rate, on outcomes.

5% of first-year contract value

Due only when the matched buyer pays the vendor. There is no lead fee, no fee to accept a match, and nothing owed before a buyer chooses to engage. The rate is the same for every vendor in every category, and it is not negotiated: a vendor who will not participate on these terms does not participate. Vendors pay for outcomes, never for influence.

What money cannot buy.

This is the part that matters, and it is short.

What a vendor pays never enters the matching math. Fee data lives elsewhere in the system and is not available to the scoring path; an automated test guards that boundary. No vendor can buy a score or a place on a shortlist, by any means, at any price.

The same holds for inclusion in the catalog and for position on a buyer’s shortlist. There is no amount that changes any of these, because the mechanism that produces them cannot read the mechanism that produces fees.

That separation is built into the platform rather than promised by us. Scoring runs against interview-validated vendor records and the buyer’s own stated requirements. Every score, every match, and every change to either is written to an immutable record with attribution and a timestamp.

Why we publish the rate.

So there is nothing to wonder about. One number, the same for everyone, means no vendor has a better deal, no buyer has to guess whether a vendor paid more to be seen, and no conversation with us begins with a negotiation. The rate is deliberately below what vendors pay their own referral partners, because we want every vendor in the category participating and every buyer seeing the whole field.

The number is public. The number still does not move the answer, and the section above is how we make that verifiable rather than a matter of trust.