“One of our friends who works in a pretty famous company told me the other day: we’re not paying for testing, we’re paying for the privilege of not switching vendors.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. They signed with a “platform” that promised end-to-end quality analytics. At first it was great: polished dashboards, pipeline integrations, concierge support. But every quarter a new clause appeared:
- Want read-only access for auditors? That’s a paid add-on.
- Need sandbox environments? Only on the enterprise plan.
- API export limits? Exceeded. Hop on a call with sales.
And the real kicker: they couldn’t leave. Tests were trapped in a proprietary format, historical data sat in the vendor’s cloud, and even the SSO integration had contract language that made security nervous. Switching meant months of rework, tens of thousands in services, and a political fight with procurement.
We chatted about OpenQuality. Fully open source, permissive license, self-hostable or cloud-friendly. If you want to run it on-prem, do it. Want to fork it and customize the UI? Go ahead. No contracts. No surprise seat caps. No artificial API throttles.
She admitted their biggest fear isn’t the cost—it’s losing control over their own test history. If a vendor goes under or pivots, years of data vanish. With OpenQuality, the worst case is that you run the same container somewhere else. The data stays yours.
OpenQuality to the rescue isn’t just a catchphrase. It’s a reminder that transparency plus ownership beats glossy dashboards with legal handcuffs.