Twenty years of per-seat fees, and what actually changed.
For twenty years, writing an insurance scope meant paying per seat for software designed around a desktop in an office. Most shops pay $400 or more per seat per month, and several seats is normal. Nobody loved it. Everybody paid it, because the alternative was a spreadsheet an adjuster would not take seriously.
This is not a complaint about the software. It does what it was built to do, and the people who built it solved a real problem. The problem is the shape of the cost: a per-seat fee on a tool a rep touches twice a week, in a business where headcount moves with the weather.
What changed is what a scope has to be. An adjuster needs line items they recognise — category, item, quantity, unit price, subtotal — and they need the evidence for each line. For most of those twenty years, the evidence lived somewhere else: photos attached separately, measurements in another report, the reason for a line item in somebody’s head.
If the photo for a line sits in the document next to the line, the conversation gets shorter. If the citation for the matching rule is already in the file when a shingle is out of production, nobody has to go find it. That is not a format problem. It is an assembly problem, and assembly is what software is for.
So: optional, not obsolete. If a carrier requires a specific tool, keep it — Kilo does not force a choice. But if the only reason you are paying per seat is that a scope has to look like a scope, that reason is gone.