Guide
What COI tracking actually costs
Three costs, only one of which arrives as an invoice. Here is how to work out the real number for your own operation.
Three things: what you pay a vendor, what the chasing costs in your own hours, and what one missed lapse costs. Only the first has a price tag.
Key takeaways
- The invoice is the easiest cost and usually the smallest. It is also the only one anybody advertises, which is why cost conversations about this start in the wrong place.
- Your own hours are a real cost even though nobody bills you for them. Work them out with your own numbers — the arithmetic is below — rather than trusting a figure from a vendor's landing page.
- The third cost is the gap, and it is lumpy. It is nothing at all most years and then a premium-audit chargeback or an uncovered claim. You cannot average it; you can only decide how much of it you are willing to carry.
- Watch what a price is attached to. Per subcontractor, per document, per seat and per chase all behave differently as you grow — and the growth is exactly when you need it to behave.
- We do not quote other vendors' prices here. We would get them wrong, they change, and a number you can check and find stale is worse than no number.
By the Sealinn team · 6 min read · Updated July 2026 · Written for general contractors
Three costs, and only one arrives as an invoice
Ask what certificate tracking costs and you will be shown a price per month. That is one of three costs, and for most small general contractors it is not the largest. The other two are your own time, and the money that leaves the business the year something is missing. They are worth writing down together, because a decision made on the invoice alone tends to pick the cheapest of the three numbers and pay the other two anyway.
What the chasing costs in your own hours
Do this with your numbers, not ours. The steps are the same for everyone; the minutes are not.
- Count the renewals, not the subs. Take the number of subcontractors you work with in a year, and count one renewal cycle each. That is the number of times somebody has to notice, ask, read and file.
- Time one cycle honestly, end to end. Noticing the date is coming. Finding the right email address. Writing the request. The follow-up. The second follow-up. Opening the PDF, reading the limits and dates, deciding whether it satisfies your requirements, and filing it where you will find it again.
- Add the exceptions. Some percentage come back wrong — the wrong form, an expired one, a name that does not match the subcontract. Each of those is a second cycle, and they are the ones that eat an afternoon.
- Multiply, then price it at the rate of whoever actually does it. If that is you, use what an hour of your attention is worth to the business rather than a wage. If it is an office manager, use theirs.
The number you land on is the one worth comparing an invoice against. It is also the number that grows fastest: renewals do not line up, so at forty subcontractors somebody is doing this most weeks of the year rather than in one annual push.
Why there is no industry figure here
You will find pages quoting an average number of hours a contractor spends on this. We have not measured it, and neither, as far as we can tell, has anyone who publishes it. A figure invented to make a case is the same category of claim as an invented accuracy rate, and this site does not print either. Your own four-step total is more useful than a national average would be even if a real one existed.
The cost of the gap, which is lumpy rather than monthly
The third cost does not arrive on a schedule. In a good year it is zero. The routes it arrives by are specific, and what happens when a sub turns out to be uninsured sets them out in full — the short version is a premium-audit chargeback that treats an uninsured sub as your own payroll, a claim that lands on your policy instead of theirs, and a defect claim years later against a status that quietly ended when their work did.
You cannot put an expected value on that, and anyone who offers you one is guessing. What you can do is notice which of the three costs is capped. The invoice is capped. Your hours are, roughly, capped by how many hours exist. The third is not capped by anything except your limits and your contract.
What the price is attached to matters more than the price
Two products at the same monthly figure can behave completely differently at the point you grow, and the difference is what the meter counts.
| Priced by | What it means | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Subcontractor | The meter runs on the size of your book, whether or not those subs sent anything this month. | What happens to dormant subs you keep for one job a year? |
| Document | Renewals, corrections and re-uploads all count. A sub who sends the wrong form twice costs three times. | Does a rejected or superseded document count against the meter? |
| Seat | Cheap while one person does it; the cost of involving a second office is a decision rather than a habit. | Do you need a seat for someone who only ever looks? |
| Chase or task | Common where a person is doing the work. The cost climbs precisely with the subs who are hardest to get documents from. | What does a bad month cost, not an average one? |
There is a fifth shape worth naming: free up to a limit. Ours is free for the first 10 subcontractors with no card, which is a real answer for a contractor whose whole book fits inside it and a starting point for one whose does not. The full numbers are on the pricing page rather than restated here, because a price in two places is a price that will eventually disagree with itself.
Comparing the three routes on the same page
Once the arithmetic is on paper, the choice is usually between three things rather than a long shortlist. A spreadsheet costs nothing on the invoice line and everything on the hours line, and when that trade still works is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one. An outsourced service moves the hours off your desk and moves the decisions with them — what that trade costs in control is the part that is easy to miss at signing. Software keeps the decisions and takes the chasing, which is the trade this product makes.
If you are still working out which capabilities actually matter rather than what they cost, what a small GC actually needs is the page for that, and it is deliberately not a price comparison.
Questions you might have
Why will you not tell me what the alternatives charge?
Is the free tier a trial?
What is the cheapest possible option?
Does the reminder cadence cost extra?
Where this comes from
- ACORD — Certificate of Liability Insurance (form 25)
- NCCI — Countrywide workers' compensation forms and rules
- Internal Revenue Service — Independent contractor, self-employed, or employee
Work out your number, then check ours.
Free for up to 10 subcontractors, no card. The reminders and the coverage checks are on every plan.