Brocade
TL;DR: Three UK firms from three unrelated professions — building safety consultancy, risk consultancy and accountancy — have independently arrived at the same model: give the compliance software away, charge for the advice. That is a market structure, not a coincidence. It can be very good value, and it carries one question worth settling before you sign: what happens to your golden thread when the retainer ends.
Read the golden thread guide →
Three Firms, Three Professions, One Commercial Model
Give the software away. Charge for the advisory. Three tracked firms now do this, and none of them came from the same starting point.
The tool is not the product. It is the delivery mechanism for a professional relationship, and it is priced accordingly — which is to say, often at nothing.
CTS BuildSafe comes from building safety consultancy. Its platform sells "backed by independent CTS advisory" as a product feature — the consultancy underwrites the software's credibility. The compliance work is real: the golden thread is mapped line by line against the statutory instruments, with evidenced or missing status per requirement, a completeness score, and an export formatted for the Building Safety Regulator. There is no published pricing page.
4site Consulting comes from safety and risk consultancy. Its client portal is badged "Entirely Free for All Our Clients". The portal does what you would expect — safety management, an action dashboard, contractor and stakeholder sharing, compliance tracking. The revealing detail is where the firm competes: its consultancy domain entered our tracked search results this week, not its software. The consultancy ranks. The portal is what clients get for being clients.
Leasehold Clarity comes from accountancy and company secretarial work, and it inverts the pattern. It charges for the software — £2 to £3 per unit per month — and bundles a human into the paid tier. Its own description of the quarterly review is worth quoting because it is the whole argument in one line: "This is not an automated report — it is a real conversation with a qualified professional."
Three disciplines. One conclusion. When compliance is the product, the expensive part is judgement, and software is the cheapest thing in the bundle.
Why This Is Happening Now
The Building Safety Act 2022 created a duty that software cannot discharge on its own.
A safety case report is an argument. It says: here is my building, here are the fire and structural risks, here is why my controls are adequate. Assembling the evidence is a document management problem, and software is good at that. Deciding whether the argument holds is a professional judgement, and software is not good at that at all.
Engaging a consultant transfers the work, never the status. Who the Accountable Person is turns on legal estate and repairing obligation (Building Safety Act 2022, s.72), not on who holds the pen.
That gap is the commercial opportunity. A volunteer director of a resident-managed block is not short of storage — they are short of someone who can look at their building and say whether it is enough. Firms that can say that credibly have something to sell. The software becomes the surface the relationship runs on.
It also explains the pricing asymmetry. A consultancy engagement for a higher-risk building runs to five figures. Against that, the software costs the firm almost nothing to include, and including it makes the engagement stickier. Charging separately would be haggling over the small number while the large one sits on the table.
What You Are Actually Buying
This is not a warning. Free software attached to good advice is often the better deal, particularly for a single building with a director who has never done this before. Paying for a tool and then paying again for someone to tell you what to put in it is not obviously smarter.
But you are buying two things that separate cleanly, and it is worth knowing which is which:
- The advice — someone qualified reviewing your building and standing behind the conclusion. This is what you are paying for. It is worth what it costs.
- The records — your fire risk assessments, your remedial action history, your resident engagement evidence, your mandatory occurrence reports. These are yours by duty, and they live in someone else's system.
Those two have different lifespans. The advice ends when the engagement ends. The duty does not.
See what a real safety case actually takes →
The Question to Ask Before You Sign
One question, asked early, settles it:
If we end the retainer, how do we get our golden thread out, in what format, and how long do we keep access?
This is a fair question and a good consultant will have a ready answer. Some will hand you a structured export. Some will give you a PDF bundle. Some will not have thought about it, and that answer is also informative.
Ask it before signing, not at the point of leaving. At the point of leaving you have no leverage and a deadline.
Three follow-ups worth having in the same conversation:
- Format. A PDF of a register is not the same as the register. If your next system has to re-key three years of inspection history from PDFs, the export was nominal. Ask what structured formats are available.
- Scope. Does the export include the evidence — the photographs, the certificates, the contractor sign-offs — or only the index that points at them? An index without the documents is a catalogue of things you no longer have.
- Continuity of duty. If your building is assessed six months after the engagement ends, can you still produce a complete record? The Building Safety Regulator will ask you, not your former consultant.
What This Means for Building Managers
If you are a resident director, the advisory-attach model is probably good news. You get professional judgement and a system to keep records in, priced as one thing. Take it. Ask the export question, get the answer in writing, and keep your own copy of anything that would be painful to reconstruct.
If you are a managing agent with a portfolio, the calculation differs. You will outlive any single consultancy engagement, and you need one consistent record across buildings that each may have arrived with different advisors and different systems. A tool tied to one firm's retainer is a portfolio-level dependency, and triage across a portfolio is hard enough without three different exports to reconcile.
If you are a consultant deciding whether to build a portal or partner with one, note what these three firms are actually monetising. None of them is trying to win on software features. They are using the software to make the advisory relationship easier to deliver and harder to leave. That is a strategy about retention, not about product.
Questions
What is the advisory-attach model in building safety software? The software is given away free and the consultancy retainer is charged for. The tool is the delivery mechanism for the advice, not the product being sold.
Is free compliance software a bad deal? Not necessarily. It can be excellent value while the retainer runs. The risk is what happens to your records when the engagement ends, which is a question to settle before you sign rather than after.
Who is legally responsible for the safety case if a consultant prepares it? The accountable person. Under the Building Safety Act 2022, the duty sits with the accountable person or principal accountable person and cannot be transferred to a contractor or consultant.
What should I ask a consultant offering free compliance software? Ask how you export your golden thread, in what format, and what happens to access if the retainer ends. Ask it before signing, and get the answer in writing.
Does the Building Safety Regulator care which software I use? No. The Building Safety Regulator assesses the evidence you produce, not the tool that produced it. What matters is that your golden thread is complete, current and available when asked for.
Further Reading
- The golden thread in practice — what the record actually has to contain
- What a real safety case actually takes — written with a practising building safety consultant
- Who is the principal accountable person? — where the duty sits
- Building Safety Act 2022 — primary legislation
- Building Safety Regulator guidance — official guidance
This article is for informational purposes. For building-specific advice, consult a qualified fire safety professional.