QA | New Pricing for Quality Verification Services Effective October 16

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Quality Assurance

On September 5, Lighting Global Quality Assurance announced it will introduce new pricing for quality verification services, effective October 16, 2019. Our goal for the new pricing structure is to increase fairness for companies and better reflect the wide variety of products submitted for quality verification, putting the program on a more sustainable trajectory.
Demand for quality-verified products and related services are strong. Lighting Global QA signed approximately 100 testing agreements with companies in just the last 12 months. At the same time, products are becoming more complicated, increasing our labor cost per product. There are now 39 quality-verified solar home system kits and 26 product families, up from less than a dozen of each two years ago. The QA team delivers a unique and valuable service to the company behind each of these products. With nearly a decade of experience, our team helps get your products tested and quality verified at least cost and as quickly as possible.
You can find our current fee table on the Lighting Global website. This document contains our new fee table and a short explanation of each fee. We have also created a set of hypothetical examples to illustrate how our new pricing will work in practice. All testing agreements CLASP signs with companies on or after October 16 will be governed by the new pricing. 
The new pricing is the result of long and careful deliberation. The QA team benefited from substantial stakeholder input throughout this process. We conducted an online survey and hosted two webinars in March to solicit feedback. We summarized this feedback in an email on March 26 and on the Lighting Global website, where you can also download the webinar slides. Our new pricing reflects this feedback. Key features include:

  • Pricing will vary with the complexity of the product, instead of charging a flat $1,000 fee for products being tested for the first time and $500 for renewals. While still heavily subsidized by donors, our new pricing will be fairer and better reflect the time the QA team needs to deliver consistent, high-quality service for a growing variety of products.
  • We will waive the $300 base fee for new customers submitting their first product for quality verification. We hope this will motivate more companies to design to the Quality Standards and seek quality verification for their products.
  • We will continue to supervise random sampling. We received many expressions of support for allowing companies to contract directly with an approved sampling agent, but also heard concern that allowing companies to do so could undermine trust in the process and open the door to misconduct. We will reevaluate the situation periodically.
  • Benchmarking analysis of your product will be optional. This comparison of your product against others tested in the past year is currently included in every cover letter that accompanies test results. Going forward, this value-added service will be available for an additional fee.

These changes in how we price our services do not affect which products or components need to be tested or how. We will continue to work closely with companies to develop test plans that minimize the time and expense of getting products tested and quality verified.
Please join us later this month on a webinar where we will explain the new pricing for quality verification services, walk through some examples, and answer any requests for clarification. The webinar will take place at two different times on September 18 to accommodate a variety of time zones. You must register in advance to participate.

  • Asia/Pacific: 2:00 UTC (7:30 Delhi / 10:00 Beijing) Register here.
  • Other Regions: 13:00 UTC (9:00 New York / 15:00 Paris / 16:00 Nairobi / 18:30 Delhi / 21:00 Beijing) Register here.