COI tracking software: a buyer’s guide
Certificate of insurance tracking is a small category with a wide price range — from free spreadsheets to platforms costing more than $10,000 a year. This guide explains what you are actually paying for, and how to tell which tier you need.
What COI tracking software does
If your business hires subcontractors, vendors or carriers, your contracts almost certainly require them to carry insurance and to name you as an additional insured. A certificate of insurance — usually an ACORD 25 — is the document evidencing that. COI tracking software does four things:
- 1.Collects certificates from vendors and their insurance agents
- 2.Reads the certificate and extracts coverage, limits, dates and endorsements
- 3.Compares what it found against the requirements in your contract
- 4.Chases renewals before coverage lapses
Step four is where most of the value sits. Only around 20% of carriers notify a certificate holder when a policy lapses, so unless somebody is actively watching expiration dates, a subcontractor can be working uninsured on your site for months before anyone finds out — typically at the moment of a claim.
What it costs, and why the range is so wide
| Tier | Typical price | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet | Free | Under ~10 vendors, low risk |
| Self-serve software | $200–300/mo | 20–500 vendors |
| Enterprise platform | $500–2,000+/mo | 500+ vendors, complex hierarchies |
| Per-verification services | $5–10 per check | Sporadic, low volume |
The jump from self-serve to enterprise usually buys you services rather than software: dedicated account management, outsourced chasing of vendors, integration with an ERP, and complex multi-entity structures. If you do not need those, you are paying for a sales and success organisation you will rarely call.
The thing to actually evaluate
Every product in this category claims to read certificates. The question worth asking on a trial is narrower: does it check the endorsements, or only the dollar limits?
A certificate can carry perfect limits and still leave you unprotected because the additional insured endorsement, the waiver of subrogation, or the primary and non-contributory wording was never added. That is the failure that costs real money, and it is the hardest thing for a human reviewer to catch at volume — manual review catches fewer than 75% of document alterations, and 45–55% of first submissions need corrections at all.
Take a certificate you know is deficient. Upload it. See whether the tool tells you precisely what is missing, or merely stores the PDF and marks it received.
How to choose, honestly
Under 10 vendors: a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder is genuinely fine. Do not buy software.
20 to 500 vendors: this is where self-serve tools like COIPilot fit. You have enough volume that manual tracking consumes 15–20 hours a week, and not enough to justify an enterprise contract and a six-week implementation.
500+ vendors, multiple entities, ERP integration, or you want the chasing outsourced to humans: buy an enterprise platform. myCOI, TrustLayer and Certificial are built for that and we are not. Their price reflects services we do not provide.
Where COIPilot sits
$249/month, unlimited certificate reviews, up to 250 vendors, live in about ten minutes without a demo call. We read the endorsements, not just the limits, and the compliance verdict comes from a deterministic rules engine so it is reproducible and traceable.
We are the wrong choice if you need outsourced vendor chasing, deep ERP integration, or a named account manager.