I have sat through enough of these demos to know the shape. Somebody shares a screen. The footage is beautiful. The connection is a fibre line in an office. Nothing in the next forty minutes tells you how the thing behaves on a 10/12 in a rural township with two bars.
Here are the five questions I would ask instead, in the order I would ask them. None of them are about features.
1. What does the client have to install?
Ask it first because it disqualifies fastest.
The answer you want is nothing. Not "a lightweight app." Not "they can use the web version." Nothing.
Anything the viewer has to install costs you viewers, and it is not a flat tax — you lose the unsure ones first. If the demo answer involves an account, ask what percentage of invited viewers actually open the link. If they do not know that number, they are not measuring the thing that matters.
2. What happens at two bars?
Ask for behaviour, not uptime. Uptime is about their servers. You are asking about a phone on a roof.
A straight answer sounds like: resolution drops first, then frame rate, then it holds a lower quality stream, then it buffers, then it drops and reconnects. An evasive answer sounds like "we use adaptive bitrate."
Then ask the follow-up that actually matters: what happens to the recording when the stream degrades? Because a live picture that gets ugly for ninety seconds is survivable. A recording with a hole in it is not, and the two are not automatically the same file.
3. Where does the recording live, and who can open it?
You are storing footage of the inside and outside of other people's property. Somebody will eventually ask you where it is.
Good answers: it sits behind access control, links expire, you can see who opened it, you can delete it and it stays deleted. Bad answer: a URL that works forever for anyone who has it.
Ask about deletion specifically, and ask whether it deletes from backups. "We delete it" and "it is gone" are different sentences.
4. Can somebody who is not you run it on Monday?
This is the question that separates a tool from a system, and almost nobody asks it during evaluation because during evaluation you are the one holding the phone.
Can a two-year employee run a complete inspection without calling you? Can you see what they did without driving out? Can you tell, from your office, whether the walk was complete?
If the honest answer is that it works great when the owner runs it, you have not bought a system. You have bought a nicer version of your own habit, and it will stop existing the day you are not the one on the roof. I learned that the expensive way and wrote it down.
5. What does it cost when the work is uneven?
Roofing is not a flat-volume business. You have a week in June that is quiet and a week in August that is not.
So ask how the pricing behaves in both. Per seat pricing punishes you for a crew member who runs two inspections a month. Per job pricing punishes you in a storm month. Neither is wrong, but one of them fits your shape and the salesperson does not know your shape unless you tell them.
Then ask what happens to your recordings if you stop paying. That answer is worth knowing before you need it.
The one that is not a question
After all five, go stand on an actual roof with it. Not a demo roof. A real job, a real customer, a real connection.
Fifteen minutes in the field tells you more than every screen share you will sit through, because every failure mode that matters happens outdoors with one hand, and none of them show up in an office.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I ask a vendor when comparing inspection software?
Five things, in this order: what the client has to install, how it behaves at two bars, where recordings live and who can open them, whether somebody other than you can run it, and how pricing behaves in a slow month and a storm month. Features come after all five.
How do I know if inspection software will work in poor signal?
Ask for the order it degrades in, not an uptime figure. Resolution, then frame rate, then buffering, then reconnect is a real answer. Then ask separately what happens to the recording while the live stream is struggling, because a rough live picture and a recording with a gap in it are very different problems.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.